(En)

Yvonne Pugliese

The Color of Time, Mario Sughi's exhibition at Yvonne Arte Caontemporanea

My special interest in contemporary artistic research and its evolution has defined my role as a gallerist. The strong relationship built with artists over time has convinced me, for the first time, to write the introduction for a publication, within the total respect for all the professional roles in the field of art. Before speaking about Mario Sughi’s work I wish to motivate and explain this presence in a space where we really usually read from art curators, historians or critics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My role is to support the research of artists, collaborating both with collectors and public institutions, being mindful of an ethical responsibility and in the certainty that I undertake an essential task. My specific objective is to promote an honest communication between the artist and the consumers of art. Therefore, I try to create relationships between the two, looking for situations and means to ensure that this encounter is satisfactory to both. And perhaps the written word can be a good means too.

I collaborate with artists from diverse research areas, but tend towards art that monitors and makes known the nervous susceptibility of our contemporary feeling, through the individuation of different declinations of the visual languages.

Mario Sughi draws and paints everything with a digital computerised tablet. The use of a ‘machine’ to create his ‘painting’ is absolutely coherent with a detachment of the expressive means, denoting the order of relationship between the artist and the subjects he represents. The subjects, female figures mainly, lost in space, are concentrated on themselves in all of their actions.

Heidegger wrote in the thirties “We are not in time, but we are our own time.” More than a hundred years have gone by and time has taken a tyrannical shape, demanding of the individual a continuous effort to feel included and recognised in an image of time that society has given itself. The struggle, the heaviness of living in time, the never-ending effort, that brings us out of ourselves to satisfy an image and receive a semblance of gratification. This is not criticism, it is a given, a pure reading of contemporary global living.

Mario Sughi freezes images of men and women in their moments of deeper inner life, in contact with themselves, in a sense of feeling lost which is in fact a moment of true reality.

This aspect of human beings is touching, even in the detachment of the representation. Mario Sughi does not want to express social criticism, he does not intend to demonise contemporary life. The artist has an eye for capturing those moments of alienation from the world and concentration on the self.  That’s when Heidegger’s saying reminds us again that it is the self, in its own truth, which creates time and not the contrary.

Rarely, artists are able to show us an aspect of contemporaneity and to give us at the same time a sort of resolution, of happy thought. But I think Mario Sughi succeeds in this regard and I wish the strength of its poetry to be fully perceived. Moreover, his language is ideal for conversing with younger generations and collectors, as it establishes a dialogue with the English Pop Art, founding new canons that appeal to the linguistic strategies of comics, posters and illustration.

We can observe simple and neat compositions, with few elements, often with a fascinating horizon in the background. In every work, a space continuing over the edges of the painting is left open. It is always a never-ending space, out of which the importance of the human figure and its ‘loss-recovery’ stand out.

This publication accompanies the solo exhibition presented in the gallery Yvonneartecontemporanea in Vicenza The colour of time, a title which Mario and I have chosen together. It is an evocative title and its symbolic power opens up for our thoughts countless chances of development. I wish therefore to leave it uncommented, just saying that time in the works of Mario Sughi is also given by the colours they contain in elegant and charming combinations. Sometimes it is a pastel colour, sometimes it is stronger. I believe it is the colour of our time.

 

Yvonne Pugliese, Yvonne Arte Contemporanea

presentation essay published in

Mario Sughi, Il Colore del Tempo, Vanilla Edizioni (Savona, 2013)