What’s an abstract painter to do today?
On Alessandro Sarra’s recent painting
Michele Tocca
It takes just seconds to decide if a painting works or if it doesn’t. Alessandro Sarra’s latest paintings work, make no mistake about it. With my first look, despite seeing the traits and features he’s accustomed us to—scribbles, negatives/positives, erasures—I immediately had the sensation of something foreign, questionable, unripe. Why return to motifs like these without any apparent reason? Why isn’t he risking anything new or doing any of the experimenting he’s known for and has presented in series after series up to the his latest and most copious solo exhibition, Talismano (2021)? He hasn’t even inserted one of his boutade or aphorisms, not one of those literary flourishes that usually detail his works and series, even if only in the title. Here, he’s inscrutable.
Accepting this absence of words and reasons, I approached these recent works on tiptoes. It doesn’t take a lot to know if a painting is any good, but painting is notoriously open to interpretation. Full of ‘things unsaid’, it has dark sides, invisible elements that only emerge after putting everything else together: what you don’t see is often what makes you wonder about its potential, subsequently providing clues to what’s really inside. Armed with this premise I began perceiving the tension running through every work; the startling by which an artist like Sarra—all process and language, experimentation and reaction—rarely allows himself to be led. The artist shows his awareness, of course, but more than that, he offers us his tremors, hunches, second thoughts. He’s working here on his senses, things he might have simply taken for granted until just the other day.
In short, he seems to be coming to terms with the innermost inflections of his painting.
At this generous exhibition in 2021, he unveiled a project he’d named Talismano: large canvases in which the pars construens consisted in preparing the white background that would enable and guide the haloes created by the diluted ultramarine he poured on top. In these oils, he was obviously continuing his search for a collocation of his painting in the present. In doing so, however, he was entrusting their regeneration to fate itself. Those large, sky-blue stains became like coffee grounds to read the future in and move on in such a confused historical moment as the one looming on the horizon even before Covid arrived. To me, this continuous experimentation seemed to place his canvases in the hand of destiny, on one hand, while on the other provide a warning for painting itself in also considering the personal fate of a moment in history, ours, to be precise, layered with multiple, overlapping narrations and truths, deceitful and false, in which the fine line between painting’s proverbial “Is this seriously for real?” almost completely disappears.
I’d read those works as an expression of his need to bring a crucial issue to the table in this moment in which painting is no longer a necessary mask but instead a certainty to be taken for granted. Painting is familiar today and bullies no one, but it’s recognizable because it has been recognized. Sarra instead comes from a time not-too-long-ago when painting meant having to affront a heavy accumulation of cultural burdens and taboos, especially in Italy. Painters had to pay their dues and win their place over a thousand doubts. Who can forget the intimidating awe that painting incurred in anyone who merely wanted to paint, look at a painting, or even just deal with it? Painting was a daunting thing, all initiation and sacrifice. This also served as a source of propulsion: consolidating skepticism, on one hand, always announcing its final end, on the other, it never kept anyone from the idea that wanting to paint was worth making a fool of yourself. More than anything, it reinforced the idea that painting could only be comprehended and only be dominated for fleeting moments alone.
Sarra is well acquainted with all of this, and brings along that background of preconceptions, his search for justification and the tricks required to let him continue painting that have empowered and helped him grow. Among very few others of his generation in Italy—Massimo Kaufman, Maria Morganti, Stanislao Di Giugno immediately come to mind—Sarra is an abstract painter, meditating and piecing together a language on Process Art and continuing along his path that runs from Italian Pittura Analitica to Brice Marden and Christopher Wool. The more alchemical, phenomenological, and optical aspects of his work bought him nearer to his international contemporaries, ‘process abstraction’ painters like Mark Francis, Jason Martin, and Callum Innes with whom he shares fascination with Post-painterly Abstraction. More unusual—and what sets him apart—is his interest in the initial planning, the a priori painting, a fairly out of synch with the times position from which to pursue paths of historical abstraction less followed today– from music to utopia and theosophy– that ended up becoming the driving force behind his fixations with material, interaction between painting and drawing, use of engraving technique, second thoughts, and erasures. And as recalled above, there’s also the allure of language. Sarra has always enjoyed giving a painting a literary or metaphoric tone, often with a certain restrained and sardonic irony – with gestures a step aside from painting, the texts and titles he places in direct dialogue with his playful, more performative aspects that reflect an impulse popular in the early 2000s.
Back to the here and now, isn’t he perhaps setting his hypotheses and processes aside in these works, letting painting alone scatter intention and embody meaning? With its existential haphazardness and big questions, the Talismans series instills terror: its effect on the artist must have been as malevolent as it was paralyzing. The dizzying experience it provided apparently sufficed to clear his mind and ley him return to his previous subjects with a different sensibility. Seeing Senza titolo (2022) painted immediately afterwards offers encouragement, illustrating how painting no longer needs any intentions to begin, no longer requires title or initial hypothesis, asks nothing of the unknown. It just is. A painting that just is need not entrust itself to destiny, rather more pragmatically it places itself in the hand of the beholder’s share: retracing his motives and methods, Sarra no longer needs a reason, he rewinds and unfolds his DNA, letting the painting question its needs itself, but only if and when the observer's eyes so desire.
There’s pleasure, or better delight, because nothing comes too easy in this painting. Sarra accepts himself as a dilettante and achieves a lightness he’d always wooed, a dimension visible in certain canvases he kept in his studio and never showed, such as W gli angeli (2011). He’s reached this point fully aware of the new needs, new problems and mirages that arise for those who paint in times when painting is taken for granted, something that wouldn't even be so bad if it didn't bring with it the reassuring effect of believing painting can be exactly understood and dominated, if it didn’t lead to a physiological flattening in the general confusion typical of historical phases of saturation, if it didn't become just fandom for aggregation and recognition.
No one can tell me these paintings don’t come also from here. They’re more sensitive, more hesitant works. Attempts at a new beginning, attempted youthfulness.
The reasoning behind his scribbling is no longer as contorted as before. It now emanates from a dazed, churning mind while painting runs parallel to life: it stuns. The line breaks out of the space of the canvas, moves and escapes from the green and yellow backgrounds. It goes out and transforms into emptiness, then turns back to the dilemma of white canvas, white space (Untitled, 2025). It reappears, flickering, like two black and blue ballpoint pens crumpling up on themselves in a calligraphy of the absurd (Untitled, 2024). It pieces back together before being trashed, erased in a painting that shouldn’t be there anymore. The line had started out well in that ultramarine blue, but then the artist erased it. It finally ended up staying (Untitled, 2024).
The painting is dense, bare, as had rarely been seen in Sarra before, particularly noticeable in two paintings, one in orange, the other in desaturated light blue, that return to the theme of positive and negative, like cutouts in which what is background and what is figure isn’t quite clear. You might see a human shadow or a tree. Turn around and see a curtain, flower stems, a pond. They do what painting does best: supporting figural ambiguity
Defining himself an abstract painter who makes no concessions to figurative art, Sarra no longer takes offence if anyone dares remark a certain resemblance to something in his work. After all, he’s an abstract painter landing on Earth as a Martian would do in times when narrative figuration—generally of genre and science fiction— happens to be the rule on planetary scale. That's how things went, perhaps out of the current need to say and pigeonhole everything with a focus on a storytelling that’s more imposition than offspring for painting, more message, more Netflix, more fashion design and advertising than anything else. This of course brings figurative artists great opportunities for in-depth studies and reopens questions of aesthetic trends, with over-saturation, followers, lesser imitators, and even worse, but what’s left for the abstract painter?
Well, they certainly won’t sit around waiting for rebirths or debacles. With no one else watching, abstract painters can be young again, throw all their motifs back into the mix. Sarra can forget about old Sarra who’s been pursuing those motifs for so long now. Who can say? Whether they're erasures, squiggles, or stubs, he lets them vibrate, flutter, be graceful now. Destiny has been well and truly digested, and now just pokes fun at the passage of time.
