Chimere
The Museo Nivola is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Siro Cugusi (1980) in an Italian institution. Siro Cugusi’s paintings on canvas and paper are striking for their refined technique and richly evocative imagery. Balanced between representation and abstraction, his artistic language is a personal reinterpretation of the Surrealist concept of the uncanny, the liminal and metaphysical space where nothing is what it seems. Cugusi’s art cites and deconstructs the themes and genres of classical painting, opening up windows onto parallel worlds where sacred and profane symbols merge, all logical principles are subverted and apparently unrelated objects are linked by mysterious bonds.
Curated by Luca Cheri and Camilla Mattola, the exhibition explores the artist’s most recent work: large canvases that revisit the traditional genres of landscape, still life, the nude and portraiture, combining recognisable iconographic elements, abstract forms and gestural brushwork in an unexpected way. The natural landscape is a recurring theme, evoked by large green colour fields that reference trees and plants. While the formal simplification of the subjects and the stylised details in the landscape evoke early Renaissance art, from Masaccio to Piero della Francesca, the symbolism of the image of the garden as a secret, spiritual dimension conjures the Flemish artist Hieronymus Bosch’s late fifteenth-century triptych The Garden of Delights. The perspectival construction, which alternates Renaissance one-point perspective and the bird’s eye view with the twentiethcentury distortions typical of Metaphysical and Surrealist art, is necessary for unifying a series of incongruous elements that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. The depth is, however, often contradicted by flat, decorative backgrounds that are repeated and overlapped on different planes. Figurative fragments emerge in this irrational space, struggling against a recurring impulse towards abstraction that translates into thick, expressive brushstrokes. We glimpse body parts, gears and pieces of machines, instruments and objects that are familiar but difficult to identify. Pink fields evoke human flesh, conjuring the gelatinous, grotesque bodies in paintings by Francis Bacon, but cheered by a rich, luminous palette. In some figures, it seems impossible to differentiate the biological material from the mechanical, almost as if the two dimensions have merged. The large format lends Cugusi’s paintings an experiential quality, creating an environmental, immersive effect. Before them, it seems as if we have been catapulted into impossible scenes, halfway between the unconscious and reality. Through these landscapes dominated by illusions and imagination, the artist tries to create a parallel, utopian world, a personal aesthetic and poetic dimension, in works that inevitably clash with the prose of reality and reveal themselves to be chimeras.
Siro Cugusi’s solo show, accompanied by a catalogue with critical essays by the curators, follows that of the Surrealist painter Bona de Mandiargues, symbolically linking the two different generations of artists in the continuously transforming space of the Museo Nivola. With this exhibition, the museum is confirming its commitment to supporting and promoting new generations of artists working in Sardinia and beyond.
Siro Cugusi was born in Sardinia in 1980. He graduated in painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Sassari in 2004 and thenmoved to Paris. He has shown his work in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad since 2003. His solo shows include Voyage and Return (Cooke Latham Gallery, London, 2022); Forest (Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, 2020; A Saucerful of Secrets (Galeria ATC, St. Cruz de Tenerife, 2019); Aleph (Annarumma Gallery, Naples, 2018).
Siro Cugusi. Chimere
a cura di Luca Cheri e Camilla MattolaMuseo Nivola
30 marzo – 3 giugno 2024
Siro Cugusi - The quiet of the lake
Large paintings depicting enchanted, surreal and contradictory landscapes, still lifes in which familiar, everyday objects are paired
with fantastical and mysterious components and accurately described or barely evoked body parts. Flat and highly detailed
ornamentation and abstract shapes alongside thick impasto, instinctive brushstrokes and accidental drips, in homage to gestural
painting. Siro Cugusi’s art, on view at the Museo Nivola in his first solo exhibition in an Italian museum, is made up of contrasts and contradictions and a myriad of visual surprises that make a visit to the exhibition an experience of continual discovery.
Two aspects of this exhibition are of particular importance to me. The first concerns the cultural policy of the Museo Nivola and its commitment to embracing new generations of creatives, supporting young artists, and particularly those who were born, raised or work in Sardinia. Siro Cugusi’s solo show comes a few years after his participation in Back_Up | Giovane arte in Sardegna. That exhibition, which was held in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, was one of the few initiatives organized in that period by an Italian cultural institution to support young artists and also a survey of Sardinian art at the dawn of the third decade of the twenty-first century. The second aspect is more personal and dates back to when Siro Cugusi and I first met, a very long time ago, during our years of post-secondary school training. He was studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, I was studying cultural heritage at the University, and we found ourselves sharing a student apartment, similar to the ones that many of you stayed in while studying away from home. It is not easy to write about a memory, and the result is often polluted by distorted feelings and images. It forces us to stick to a map and a kind of set of rules; it is a little like claiming that two clocks – one for the past, the other for the present – are perfectly aligned. Achieving this synchrony is, of course, impossible. To anchor, however precariously, these memories to reality and find points of reference on this map, I have identified a place and time: a moment that serves as a landing in the sea of memory, to trace out a route from the past to the present. The landing in question was a brief moment, a chat – perhaps our first – about a subject dear to us both: the lake, a place of reflection, long silences, meditation and inspiration. As was clear from our conversation, it evoked for both of us a sense of embrace and protection, like a mother’s lap. We could both call it, in a certain sense, home. We were talking specifically about Lake Gúsana, an artificial lake near Gavoi, Siro’s hometown, and just a few kilometres from Sarule, where I grew up. The lake was surrounded by trees, clearings, insects and animals, and everything in that quiet landscape was continuously changing under the Mediterranean light, depending on the season and the time of day. We also talked about other things that I am not able to fully reconstruct (the memory is made up of murmurs and a distorted stream of images that resurface in my mind), but almost all the conversation was based, and this I am certain of, on the natural world. Today, with much curiosity and so many years after that first conversation, I have discovered that the image of the lake, with its green banks and wondrously, paradoxically rippled water, often returns in Siro’s paintings. Like in my memory, the lake landscape in his painting is the background – the precondition, perhaps – onto which windows on parallel worlds open wide, where sacred and profane symbols merge together, all logical principles are overturned and apparently unrelated objects are united by mysterious ties. While we glimpse in the dream-like, irrational space of his paintings body parts, gears and pieces of machines, tools and objects that seem familiar but are difficult to identify, what resurfaces in my memories is the image of our temporary home, made up of shared spaces, the scent of linseed oil, the southern light and people coming and going. I believe that this capacity to evoke a memory is one of the specific features of Siro’s painting, suspended between figuration and abstraction. He uses the large format to create an environmental and immersive effect, catapulting the viewer into impossible scenes, halfway between imagination and reality. Like the memories of a dream.
It is a parallel, utopian world and the result of personal, intimist aesthetic reflection that can, however, speak in a simple, calm
language. Scenes that have sprouted from the artist’s imagination that also seem to draw on a collective unconscious.
I would therefore like to thank the lake and its quiet for having been part of the conversation between Siro and me. The place
where we first met, albeit symbolically, and most importantly a source and substratum of the interior landscapes that Siro transfers to his canvases, sharing them with the kindred spirits who stop to look at them.
Luca Cheri
Text from the book of the exhibition Siro Cugusi - Chimere
Museo Nivola, 2024
Metaphysical Horizons And Alchemical Transformations
In one of the large paintings made by Siro Cugusi for the exhibition Chimere and, like the others, without a title (Untitled, 2023), an enigmatic scene unfolds in the foreground. A butterfly in the middle of the composition seems to be trapped in a grey halo, a horizontal, elongated patch of colour rendered in quick, overlapping brushstrokes. The butterfly is surrounded by branches, rocks and floating spheres that almost fill the landscape in the background. In the middle of the landscape, a path running through a grassy field narrows towards the horizon and cuts the composition in half diagonally. On the horizon, the dark shapes of the mountains contrast with the sky, which is lit by a soft glow. While the background seems static – an effect created by the flat, uniform fields – other details in the middle of the visual field suggest that something is instead actually happening. Like the butterfly, the trees are going through a strange metamorphosis: the branches, rendered in sinuous brushstrokes, transform into geometrical architectural forms. Abstract figures with shapes like cones and rhombi seem to be made of the same hybrid material, part wood, part brass. The line changes, becoming almost nervous, in the different-sized fiery spirals. The painting is pervaded by a surreal atmosphere, seeming to capture the moment when some of the components are going through a kind of alchemical transformation, passing from one material state to another. One feels a vague sense of unease before these mysterious yet familiar scenes. The disturbing and the surreal are still relevant themes in contemporary art. This is attested by the numerous exhibitions dedicated to the Surrealist movement, by now impossible to count. But a fascination with dream-like settings has also returned in the work of the new generations of artists, drawn to the aesthetic qualities of a potentially infinite iconography, as endless as the human imagination. It has often been rightly noted that the Surrealist movement emerged in response to the climate of unease and instability after the First World War. Moreover, according to the psychoanalytic interpretation, contemplation of dream-like dimensions in art and literature represents escape from a troubling reality. It is impossible not to see that we are currently in a period of immense uncertainty due to the explosion of conflicts and social tensions. The recent pandemic, furthermore, forced us into a difficult, painful process of inward reflection. Like the historical movement, contemporary reformulations of dream-like and surreal themes cannot be reductively considered merely “off the cuff” responses. The visual metaphors used to express today’s issues and problems are also a sophisticated tool for ontological investigation. Siro Cugusi has always been drawn to painting’s capacity to represent the metaphysical aspect of objects. The artist uses a traditional method: first he makes sketches and preparatory sculptures to experiment with mark and colour, then he transfers the figures and subjects to the canvas. The repertoire of references and themes he draws on range from the visual arts to cinema. Although the importance of ancient and Renaissance art as stylistic and iconographic sources is clear in all his work, he has also often explored the possibilities of combining these languages with Pop Art and the techniques of Abstract Expressionism. He almost always makes his paintings in series, simultaneously working on multiple canvases of different sizes. Noting the recurring motifs, this makes it possible for him to identify a single narrative subtext.
His most recent work is focused on landscape. Ranging from small format works to large ones, the paintings for the most part depict views of paths, woods, trees with sinuous, unnatural lines, lakes and bodies of water rendered with brushstrokes that evoke the movement of waves. The heavy stylization and linearity of his imagery are reminiscent of Giotto and Piero della Francesca. His line is clean and uniform, his palette is filled with bright hues, dominated by green and blue. Some of the decorative elements are recurrent, like white tulips, globes and red spheres with an esoteric air. Although the elements of the composition are arranged according to perspective, the trees, leaves and plants are often two-dimensional. The foreground is almost always occupied by still lifes, surfaces and tables laid with ripe fruit and shells, evoking Flemish painting.
The presence of these elements in the middle of the landscape is, however, irrational and incomprehensible. The reference is to Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500). Here, the classic theme of locus amoenus, a wondrous place with a loving, peaceful nature, takes a disturbing turn, filling up with subjects and allegories both sacred and profane.
References to the Surrealist movement are found in the combination of genres, like landscape and still life, and incongruous pairings. The animals that sometimes appear in the paintings, like the butterfly or tiger, are almost always sectioned and deconstructed. As in Surrealist iconography (see the work of Leonora Carrington, for example), the distorted proportions suggest a totemic function or representation of the expansions and expressions of the unconscious.
The flat fields, static quality and almost total absence of human figures evoke Metaphysical painting. The rarefied, dream-like atmosphere of the landscapes echoes De Chirico’s disturbing urban spaces, while the simplification of the objects in the still lifes and the unnatural perspective seem to pay homage to Carrà. However, while the uncanny effect in these artists’ works was generated by using bizarre logic to reorganize reality (more precisely, figuration), abstraction is what creates perceptive deception in the parallel world created by Cugusi. To take an example, in the still background of Untitled (2023), abstraction suddenly interrupts the quiet of nature. Although relegated to small portions of the canvas, the abstract masses composed of multiple layers of paint distort the objects. In the pink fields, we can also glimpse sections and parts of a nude body, alluding to an erotic dimension. Transformed by abstraction, the landscapes are only apparently chaotic visions. Their function is to reveal, through visual distortions and symbols, the invisible correspondences between things. In Cugusi’s interpretation, landscape offers a privileged perspective for observing the at once wondrous and ambiguous aspect of reality.
Camilla Mattola
Text from the book of the exhibition Siro Cugusi - Chimere
Museo Nivola, 2024