Sardinia, Nivola Museum hosts painter Siro Cugusi's first solo exhibition at an institution

The Nivola Museum in Orani (Nuoro) presents Chimere, the first solo exhibition of Siro Cugusi (1980) in an Italian institution. Siro Cugusi’s painting is developed in works on canvas and paper that are striking for their refined technique and multiple suggestions. Suspended between figuration and abstraction, his artistic language reinterprets in a personal and intimate key the surrealist concept of the uncanny, the liminal and metaphysical space where nothing is as it seems. Cugusi’s painting cites and deconstructs themes and genres of classical painting, opening windows to parallel worlds where sacred and profane symbols merge, every logical principle is subverted and seemingly unrelated objects are united by mysterious bonds.

Curated by Luca Cheri and Camilla Mattola, the exhibition is a journey through the artist’s most recent production, characterized by large canvases that revisit the traditional genres of landscape, still life, nude and portrait, unexpectedly combining recognizable iconographic elements, abstract forms and gestural brushstrokes.

The natural landscape is a recurring theme, evoked by broad green backgrounds that reference trees and plants. If the formal simplification of the subjects and the stylized details in the landscape recall the masters of the early Renaissance, from Masaccio to Piero della Francesca, from a symbolic point of view the image of the garden as a secret and spiritual dimension recalls the triptych of the Garden of Delights, created from the end of the 15th century by the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

The perspective construction, which alternates the Renaissance systems of the central monofocal point of view and the bird’s eye view with twentieth-century distortions typical of Metaphysics and Surrealism, is crucial in unifying a series of incongruous elements on the canvas, sometimes difficult to distinguish. Depth, however, is often contradicted by flat, reiterated, overlapping decorative backgrounds on different planes.

In this irrational space, figurative fragments emerge, struggling against a recurrent impulse toward abstraction that results in material and expressive brushstrokes. We catch glimpses of anatomical parts, gears and machine parts, tools and objects that are familiar but difficult to identify. Pink backgrounds hint at human flesh, with a reference to the gelatinous, grotesque bodies in Francis Bacon’s paintings, but soothed by the rich, luminous palette. In some figures it does not seem possible to distinguish between biological and mechanical matter, almost as if the two dimensions are blurred.

The large format gives Cugusi’s painting an experiential quality: the canvases create an environmental and immersive effect. The feeling is that of being catapulted inside impossible scenarios somewhere between the unconscious and reality. Through these landscapes dominated by illusions and imagination, the artist tries to build a parallel and utopian world, a personal aesthetic and poetic dimension, in a quest that, destined inevitably to clash with the prose of reality, can only turn out to be a chimera.

Siro Cugusi’s solo exhibition, accompanied by a catalog with critical texts by the curators, follows that of the Surrealist painter Bona de Mandiargues, symbolically connecting two different generations of artists in the ever-changing space of the Nivola Museum.

With this exhibition, the museum confirms its vocation to support and promote new generations of artists active in Sardinia and beyond.

Siro Cugusi was born in Sardinia in 1980. He graduated in painting from theSassari Academy of Fine Arts in 2004 and later moved to Paris. Since 2003, he has taken part in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Solo exhibitions 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). He currently lives and works in Sardinia.

For all information, you can call +39 0784 730063 or send an email to info@museonivola.it.

Image: Siro Cugusi, Untitled (2022; oil on canvas, 190 x 285 cm)

Sardinia, Nivola Museum hosts painter Siro Cugusi's first solo exhibition at an institution

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