Alpenglühen - 100 years of Ettore Sottsass Jr.
Siro Cugusi’s work offers a place of meditative introspection; a space where one can contemplate beauty and mystery, erotic fantasies and innocent pleasures, memories and thoughts. His paintings, sculptures and installations are characterised by figures that no longer correspond to the names they have been given. He rejects traditional narrative painting and creates an autonomous, personal language full of archaic and metaphorical meanings. This language is not one of clear images but is (like memories and dreams), veiled, incomplete and intuitive. Human bodies, flora, fauna and the mineral world co-exist in a space where the laws of nature are upturned: a sanctuary where both human and mythical beings gather.
Siro’s visual vocabulary frees forms through the process of painting: having been reduced to their essence, his figures adopt a biomorphic, surreal nature. Instead of an exact rendering, the viewer is presented with suggestions of real objects that are subjected to the artist's personal interpretation of their forms and meanings. Thus, he transforms, past and present, into new realities, abstracted and controlled.
“The aspect I'm most interested in investigating in painting is the field of tension between the figurative and the abstract. When I start a painting, I don’t have a specific picture in my mind’s eye. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitable. Distorting or destroying a motif, while I’m painting, is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable, then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. That means a process of painting, changing or destroying until I think it has improved.”
'Alpenglühen - 100 years of Ettore Sottsass Jr.' publication