Il Maestro, La Voce, La Luce

Press release

Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to present for the second time the solo show by the Italian artist Alessandro Sicioldr.

Born in Tuscania (Italy) in 1990, Alessandro Bianchi - Sicioldr starts his training in his father’s studio, where he learns techniques and materials of painting and drawing. From Surrealism he takes the irrationality and the exploration of the human psyche, while from Symbolism he draws the dreamlike dimension. For what concerns the use of colours, light and minute details, he is clearly inspired by Mannerism and Flemish painters. Sicioldr’s works represent his own interiority and subconscious. His paintings are immersed in an either contemplative or chaotic atmosphere, where out of time mysterious figures solemnly fill in the space, which is an undefined “somewhere else”, full of enigmas. What we cannot properly define and understand in words is skilfully imprinted on the canvas. This becomes the essential mean to tell the viewer about visions that would be indescribable otherwise.

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Sicioldr's artworks are not limited to producing images as extrapolations of the unconscious, as it happens, for example, in the tradition of surrealism. Each of his works is the enactment of a story, with elusive and mysterious contents; the mechanism that regulates these stories has its own precise internal coherence, which we are not allowed to explore but it is guaranteed to us by the clarity of the compositional structure of each painting. The refined pictorial quality, almost neo-fifteenth-century, is a further factor that on the one hand produces a nearly enveloping fascination in the viewer, on the other it establishes a distance, intangibility, separateness between the world that makes itself visible through the work and whoever faces it. Where Sicioldr's imagination came from is a question that inevitably intrigues and mobilizes a historical-critical eye. We therefore like to think that the impressions generated by the Etruscan tombs frescoes of the contiguous Tarquinia have left a mark due to their syncretistic nature, which allows to hold together narration and rituality, the East and the Roman world. Moreover, the flatness of the Etruscan painting is functional to express the vividness of the images, which Sicioldr always pursues with great determination and accuracy. Later on, upon this “identitarian” matrix, many influences produced by other core visual experiences, such as those with Bosch and Carpaccio, are grafted. From Bosch derives that triggering energy capable of imagining stunning but also bizarre additions to noted and familiar shapes; from Carpaccio the calm strength to enclose inside of a visual order that unknown impetus which stories carry with them. The importance of the “untimely” ones as masters of the magical Realism (in particular in Sicioldr a fascination for the suspended world of Antonio Donghi is perceived) or the great De Chirico. As a matter of facts with the artist from Tuscania we face a leap of genre compared to these key experiences; in fact he lands to what can be defined as “fantasy realism”. Sicioldr’s world, borrowing the terms used by Nietzsche in his Zarathustra, is a world as seen through “trans-mundane” eyes; which inevitably raises the issue of what weight, due to direct experience or contamination, the imagery of fantasy literature, extremely important to today’s cultural production, carries in his artwork.

- from the critical text curated by Giuseppe Frangi

Installation Views