In A Saucerful of Secrets, the artist exhibits ten oil paintings on canvas created between 2017 and 2018, as products of his investigations of the landscape and tension between the figurative and the abstract. In his works, Cugusi introduces figures in mountain and sea scenes reminiscent of the classic Italian painters Piero della Francesca and Masaccio. iIn order to create tension, the artist employs surrealistic and biomorphic figures in the foreground of the canvas, celebrating natural and organic life, the mineral world, plants, animals and parts of the human body. In the artist's words: they are "figures that no longer correspond to the names we gave them". By painting undefined figures which participate in many worlds without hierarchies, the artist's contemporaneity and his resistance to the imperious action of identification and classification emerges.
With Cugusi, painting is seduction. As Louise Bourgeois said, in relation to the creation of beauty, "seduction is a way of convincing". Beauty, understood in this way, has more to do with the experience of the form than with the form itself as an object. His painting is something instinctive, of direct perception, of spontaneous feelings, that coexists with his other nature of reflection, and it is in the act of painting where the change or modification of the forms is carried out with the purpose of seducing. The result is an uncontrollable beauty of undefined, attractive figures.
Siro Cugusi was born in Italy in 1980 and currently lives in Sardinia. He graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti (Sassari, Sardinia) in 2004. His recent solo exhibitions include: "Aleph", Annarumma Gallery, Naples (2018); "Secret Garden", Galleri KANT, Copenhagen (2018); and at the Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, California (2017). Recent group exhibitions include: "Like No Other", Annarumma Gallery, Naples (2018); "Alpenglühen - 100 years of Ettore Sottsass Jr."Belmacz", London (2018); "Awkward", Anna Zorina Gallery, New York (2017); "Whet Ya Whistle", Galleri KANT, Copenhagen (2017); "Tom Dash and Siro", Dean Borghi Fine Art, New York (2016); and Mark Borghi Fine Art, New York (2015). Cugusi has exhibited several times at the Art Basel Miami Scope Artshow.
