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06/25/2007: "We are all the history of our own lives"
I am so used to mixing drawing and painting, not following any of the conventional rules. In my paintings, I often continue to draw over layers of colour, and vice versa, there are layers of colour over the drawings, which can sometimes be seen as a trace of the development of the painting.
I would perhaps consider my identity as an artist to be this strong connection between drawing and painting, both assuming a vital role within my works.
I am basically a painter of the human form. When I lived in Carpineta, in the midst of green trees and meadows, I tried to understand what my relationship with nature was, since at the time I was captivated by its charms, without managing to analyze my reaction.
I entrusted my queries to my painting, in the hope that it would enable me to understand something more, and created a series of paintings representing the trees, hedges, and the sky above the cypresses and the great oaks. They were not vistas or landscapes, merely portraits of some fragments of nature.
I may have thought that the time was ripe to give energy back to my work again, to find solutions that went beyond the formal structures that I was used to. But those words could be interpreted in a different way. They could be used to understand, for instance, how insufficient the tools of conventional judgement are, when used to analyze and govern the crisis of a world that is changing at an inconceivable speed. B) Saturday morning my dear friend Sergio (Zavoli) visited me in my studio, as I am preparing this new solo exhibition at the Complesso Vittoriano in Rome, he found me within my thoughts and preoccupations. And he asked me. Alberto does the concrete value of art still exist? If so, what is it? Do you believe in the power of market forces or the cultural viscosity of the phenomenon?
Art is a word with many meanings, so each of us attributes different roles to it, that are all equally legitimate and often verifiable in those works that we universally consider to belong to the realm of art.
Often a novel or a painting, a poem, or a piece of music are viewed as documents of exceptional value, more than any other kind of document, in discovering and reconstructing the main issues of the period to which they belong.
However, these considerations do not regard the essence of art, but what art can offer to different observers.
Art cannot ask itself whether it matches its time, because it is an integral part of it.
And a work of art, created entirely by one individual, belongs to those who know how to evoke it, recognize it and imagine it. It is alive and essential as long as it produces intellectual soul-searching and cultural resonance that helps people to compare their own beliefs with those of others. It becomes useless and inert when, to recognize its value, we have to base our judgement on the prices reached in auctions or, like the TV ratings, the number of visitors to a well-sponsored exhibition.
We are all, as individuals, the history of our own lives. In the end we keep what has taken root within us, what has found fertile ground on which to build. Everyone has arrived at a crossroads in their lives, where they thought they might be able to change direction. Would our lives have been different?
Perhaps, but only as different as the titles of different novels written by the same author.
Art testifies to its own time: our increasingly confused moral values, ideologies that seem to have dissolved and others that survive in a state of alarm and conflict, the overwhelming triumph of reason, that seems to have lost its ancient charm, philosophy, forced to reflect on the brevity of time, politics, fighting for power, but then showing all the difficulties of governing a society that does not know, or want, to distinguish between progress and development. The wars, religions, and terrorism at least partly explain the entity of the crisis that has, quite unexpectedly, invaded a world that is in the most advanced state of wealth. This crisis has also affected, as a natural consequence, the world of art which, not being a metaphysical entity detached from the context in which it was created, bears the burden of the crisis and sends out signals that are anything but reassuring!
I don't believe that these considerations of mine, whether correct or not, can have anything in common with attitudes of a neo-romantic or aesthetic nature. Perhaps they should be included, as we said before, in what has affected our lives.
Alberto Sughi
For more info on Alberto Sughi see. www.albertosughi.com
