Tommaso Evangelista
A World of Potential
Art and Visual Language in the Work of Mario Sughi.
in Un desiderio senza più tempo Mario Sughi at 6° Senso Art Gallery,
Rome 15 March - 5 April 2019, Exhibition catalogue (Vanilla Edizioni, 2018)
(English translation by Simon Turner)
Mario Sughi (aka Nerosunero) works on a reformulation of everyday practice by means of an ambiguous contemplation of body and places. Like a modern-day flâneur, he observes reality with an attitude that is at once detached and involved, like a virtual “man of the crowd”. Invisible and yet subtly present, he captures a theatrical trace of desire and libido in the haziness of the habitual.
Tommaso Evangelista by nerosunero, 2018
Taking action in the aseptic space of a globalised world often means interacting with generic non-places, anonymous spaces of leisure time, in which the crowd acts indolently and superficially, simply exalting the moment, the fetish, the instant. The artist captures this intimate and contracted dimension of the figure, reducing it to an icon and visual sign by means of a subtle yet high-impact drawing. Even though it leads to a loss of the tactile relationship with paint, the digital medium he uses still picks out the timbre, bringing out other aesthetic, vaguely pop, values and establishing a precise iconic repertoire. Used as we are to seeing with indifference and vacuousness, we all see ourselves instantly in this, modulating our own personal involvement. By eliminating the background and depriving the setting of its distinguishing features, Sughi on the one hand brings about a sort of generalisation of form and, on the other, he blocks the suspended time-image in an alluringly alienated universe. This entails the cancellation of history by anecdote, and a preference for residual form in its structural conformation: by depriving the narrative of substance, Sughi simply translates the logic of the symbols of the contemporary world into a notation and stylisation of the trace, giving shape to depersonalised, extra-ordinary icons that express new values.
The dematerialisation of the presence (of the artist? or of the subject?), which in graphic terms involves an excess of outlines and a digital pictorial fusion, evokes a syntactical vocabulary consisting of pure expressive elements (forms and colours). Their workings are regulated by the psychic laws of inner needs and selection. This dissolving of the structure leads to an opening out of feeling, to the radicality of the visible, and to a transcription of the world in the form of symbols and structures that are not without internal resonance. However, it also causes a dissolving of the narrative by taking on objects and acts of consumption that are meaningful in themselves. The compositions are based on combinations of graphic and chromatic forms. These exist independently through a perception – and a transcription – that is purely emotional (though partly conveyed by street photography), in the absence of reality. In other words, it is based on a stable projection of space and tells us of a liquid relational setting in which the subjects are devoid of any empathic stimuli, and captured in their individualism and isolation. The artist appears to favour pure forms and structures but, as it becomes the ideal setting for action and description, the urban space of consumption is transformed into a reflection of a hedonistic lifestyle that corrodes all meaning. It deprives existence of emotion and turns it into a frontier of repetition. A repetition that is different, and yet always the trivialisation of potential, moving towards a return to reality that drains representation by means of the moral fleshing of individuals and the loss of a centre. Perspective abstinence, chromatic reduction, and formalism tending towards an abstract, two-dimensional world that conveys a sense of immobile fullness, coupled with figurative and gestural minimalism, are all factors that help eliminate spontaneity through the emergence of an interval, and a periphery. A deviation of meaning comes about in the gap between everyday routine and signification, generating a new language: the work then responds to the impossible appeal of reality, showing a part in shadow where the individual undertakes to destroy his own forces, and a part not dominated by utility but rather by the allure of the useless, in which it is not reason but rather instinct that dominates. In this space, where Sughi has his figures move, we watch the emergence of superficial but latent forces in the hedonistic torpor of the end. We see the materialisation of a reality in reverse, which presents the experience as something not signifiable but solely representable. One that is unreal and yet so all-encompassing and current, in an immediate present that takes its unreal spatial qualities from Metaphysics, together with the apparent mundane lives of decontextualised and decontextualisable gestures. Sughi’s reality is barely permeable to any impressions, and it is the line of an absence, no longer time nor memory but the sole aseptic communicative reality that points to a segmented, synthesised, impersonal time. Form may disappear but its root is generative rather than eternal, because it is digital, transitory, and synthetic. The hypervisibility of the synthetic brings about a creative vision of selection, a specification of the margin, a reformulation of the minimal, impersonal action that puts a brake on the informal expansion of the body. Looking for structural unity in precise, everyday gestures, as viewers we adopt an alternative, parallel vision, deluding ourselves with regard to the distance. At the same time, we find ourselves in the story, in the daily dimension of emptiness, in a suspended state of waiting in which waiting is a precise aesthetic of disappearance, which nullifies both narrator and narration, which is to say cause and effect. Like a series of ill-defined snapshots depleted through display, due to an excess of communication and colour, the works saturate the vision. They drain the aura and break down day-to-day life but it is precisely in this aseptic fragmentation, amplified by apparently disengaged and ironic digital painting, that we find an open dimension, a threshold where baring the act is not a symptom of simplification but rather of purification. The contradiction of Sughi’s painting lies in this exclusion of natural beauty and in its adoption of the form. Even though it is excessive in its post-capitalist realist-style hedonism, to the extent that it eliminates the organic by means of a subtle process of graphic disassembly, increasing the dimension of narrating as a form of memory. The story of other lives basically allows the artist to make his own, as though he were on a stage, revealing the story of himself.
Tommaso Evangelista
Art Historian and curator at CAMUSAC
(Cassino Museo Arte Contemporanea)
Exhibition Catalogue available @ Vanilla Edizioni
