The Imminence and Immensity of Siro Cugusi

For a fan of Siro Cugusi's work, walking into the Bowman Hal gallery in Madrid and facing his freshly revealed solo exhibition Imminence is quite an experience. Taking the gallery's spacious venue into consideration (not to mention the enormous SOLO CSV art space housing it), the exhibition features a selection of major, landscape-oriented, almost billboard-sized works, "investigations of the tension between the abstract and the figurative, revisited through a personal language that sometimes corresponds with reality," as the artist puts it. And this monumentality isn't accidental, but a purposely chosen quality that inevitably draws the viewer's attention, setting them on a journey into strangeness.

Accompanied by an insightful artist talk, the opening evening at this unique space felt genuinely focused on appreciating and connecting with the Sardinian artist's paintings. Working with archetypal painterly tropes such as landscape, still life, and portraiture, Cugusi consciously makes those elements overlap, blend, fuse, and clash, resulting in an exciting assemblage of mere suggestions and hints. Never fully defined and almost always transforming, mutating, and forming unexpected hybrids of logics, they become ways to tickle the cognition, to spark the imagination, and to propose the idea of an alternative reality.

In essence, Cugusi often works with the concept of a garden, "the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world," as Gilles Clément suggested. Tending to it, and finding his way around it (often through literal paths), the visuals frequently clash views of nature or organic elements with artificial, man-made objects, heavy with light, massive with small, constructing what he calls an "equilibrium of opposites." All this adds to the tension between perhaps disparate, mostly existing realities and their logics, and extends to the painterly languages or techniques. Ranging from nods to prehistoric Stone Age or Bronze Age history of his native island, to early Renaissance greats, and employing anything from repetitive, Rousseau-like foliage renditions to raw action painting gestures blurring the image with watered-out paint and drips, the mixture of elements reflects Cugusi's distinct way of collecting or processing thoughts, experiences, emotions, and any sort of information or input. This is why paintings are worked on simultaneously, continuously, and in series rather than individually, and why they constantly change, evolve, and develop, layering real-life dynamics and influences on top of each other (which are clearly visible in their final forms).

As such, they become suspended, perhaps surreal moments suggesting that something imminent has occurred or will occur, and we, the viewers, are the ones activating it by observing, relating, and standing in their Imminence. —Saša Bogojev