Echo of a light escape

Giusi Sferruggia’s work investigates the pictorial fact in its most intimate dimension, as a process that renews from time to time, through its specific formal quality and compositional order, the pictorial texture.

Each work seems to take up the language of painting from its degree zero, from that prepictorial threshold where form and meaning return to make and unmake each other.

In this dynamic, the work appears as the place where painting reveals its own antecedents and removals, making visible what usually remains implicit in its own making. It is the supports themselves, often taken from their everyday dimension, that suggest this unexpected unveiling, as if the material of the support were disposed to collect a gesture that transforms it without, however, erasing its origin.

The encounter with pigment, for this reason, is the event par excellence: it is in color that the pictorial fact is accomplished, as a synthesis, in sign, of gesture and energy. The tighter and more obsessive articulations, as well as the more liquid and relaxed ones, tend to move space in a double direction, perceptual and psychological. On the perceptual side, the chromatic reverberation modifies the spatial coordinates, projecting them from the work outward; on the psychological side, the movement is symmetrical, and seems to lead the gaze from the outside to the depth of the image.

This tension that animates the surface along the directrix of inside and outside finds its counterpart in the internal tensions that are triggered: in the burns that color inflicts on the pictorial matter, in the vibration of color relationships, in the continuous encroachment of visual fields.

As Deleuze wrote, painting is necessarily a deluge: a process that overwhelms and regenerates, that dissolves contours to bring forth a new perceptual order, precarious but vital. As in that “deluge” of which Deleuze speaks, Giusi Sferruggia’s painting seems to measure itself against the original chaos from which each image attempts to emerge. The color, instead of building, seems first to dissolve, overwhelm, and erase the certainties of form and then to let fragments, margins, hints of vision emerge. It is in this oscillation between catastrophe and birth that one recognizes his gesture: a practice that does not aim atrepresentation, but at the very experience of the pictorial matter in its becoming a world. It is perhaps in the relationship with chaos that Giusi Sferruggia’s work finds its necessity.

A chaos understood not as disintegration, but as a field of forces in which painting measures itself against its own origin.
Every gesture, every chromatic variation, seems to belong to this space of primary tension, where the visible takes shape only for the time of a vibration. The surface does not order chaos, it runs through it: it holds it for an instant, lets it breathe, and in this provisional equilibrium reveals the very possibility of painting.

In this traversal of chaos, Giusi Sferruggia seems to restore to painting the possibility of still being a language of the world. Each work arises as an attempt to orient oneself in the flow, to hold back a form destined to dissolve, to listen to matter as it becomes image.

The artist inhabits this process with a gesture that is both discipline and abandonment, control and drift: a practice that accepts instability as a necessary condition of vision. Thus, in the evidence of color, in its precarious or brash light, painting continues to ramp up, to interrogate space, to remind us that from all chaos a form of presence can still emerge.

Free admission

The exhibition can be visited by reservation, writing to info@marthapalermo.it or at WhatsApp +393331008512