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Sergio was one of my students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, just before the pandemic broke out and during the lockdown. Prior to practicing art, he traveled on a parallel cultural track that allowed him to remain in tune with contemporary artistic debate. Studying and absorbing much of what was being discussed in the international scene.
As an attentive observer, he honed his critical thinking, clarifying with introspective analysis the reasons for his feelings, making precise choices in the varied and vast landscape of contemporary art. He immediately identified his masters and references in artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Anselm Kiefer, and Claudio Parmiggiani and enriched his knowledge with theoretical and philosophical arguments from scholars and maitre à penser such as Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Jaques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others.
It is around these references that his language takes shape and develops, taking into account what has already happened in recent art history but identifying a path that has its own recognizable physiognomy. His poetics feeds on data and signs of time and existence: a direct connection between art and life, of which he occasionally perceives not only the energy and exuberant vitality but also its painful agony, precariousness, and fragility.
And it is no coincidence that Sergio turns his attention to places that welcome discomfort and suffering, as he himself says, contemporary Cathedrals of Vulnerability: prisons, asylums, hospitals, boats… And indeed, his exhibition project Corpus-et-Vulnus opens precisely in the rooms of the former Castello prison in Velletri.
Sergio immediately grasped the semantic value and the disturbing and controversial charm of this imposing and now abandoned building, where many court archive files are found disordered, chaotic, and stacked. Erased, scattered, and nullified lives, traces of human existence, of unspeakable despair transcribed in ruinous files.
It is in this context that the sense of his work, which puts aesthetic and ethical aspects in close harmony, becomes clearer.
There is nothing decorative or aestheticizing in these works, but also no complacency and ideological flirtation. No narrative-journalistic temptation and no desire for symbolic representation, but rather a living of painting in its elementary, primary, and original language-form-light-color-material- that obeys the specific and proper reasons of painting itself, free from useless formalism and mental attitudes of rhetoric and pretentious commitment.
He retrieves those now historical references of informalism, and within this area, this introspective and meditative phenomenology, he embarked on his pictorial journey full of unpredictable events and in listening to the deep reasons of man. And this listening is recorded and impressed in the weaves and sedimentations of this painting, which surprises for its poetic outcomes and the sense of adventure, without pretense or intent.
Prof. Giuseppe Modica, painter and painting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome