Sergio Sarra

, Sergio Sarra e Darnell Valentine, Italia – USA, AST Under-18 Basketball World Cup, Mannheim (FRG), 1977 He played for the national youth teams, making his debut at sixteen in the Italian Series A basketball championship with the Fortitudo Bologna team. Upon completing his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna (1987), Sarra then moved to Rome where he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Alice in 1990, presenting an installation consisting of four painted sheets of glass and crossed by white light from industrial neon tubes. Such works – being glass – on which Sarra drew symbolic and enigmatic figures, went on to become a constant in his work. In this sense, two solo exhibitions – Trinacria dream (Porto – 2007) and un ambiente, sei vetri (Rome – 2013) – appear indicative. In occasion of the exhibition in Portugal, art critic Miguel Amado wrote: Over the next few years, he produced a series of paintings on emulsified canvas – Primitive – comprising zoomorphic figures that were almost always mirror images. The artist was invited to take part in the ''Aperto '93 Emergency/Emergenza in chipboard with three paintings on the walls featuring: Iguane, Paesaggio and Autoritratto''. Clarity and essentiality become the dominant factors in his work. In the paintings after 1997, the artist poses with his 'sign-drawing', being continuous and abstract, various elements – faces, zoomorphic groups, buildings with unknown geometries – that insist upon previous pictorial composition processes that are not entirely erased to reveal further combinatorial forms. In Une correspondance sur les fantômes avec Sergio Sarra between Sarra e Nicolas Bourriaud in May 2007, the French critic and theorist wrote: In 2000, in Rome, his works were exhibited at the Fondazione Volume!. In the same year, Sarra curated at Palazzo Chigi Odescalchi the group exhibition Conversione di Saulo a table/sculpture with a huge red Komodo dragon hooked underneath. Over the same period, he produced the performance Life drawing no. 2, representing the connection between the manual creation and collective fruition in which Sarra coerces the public's perceptive nature, using a strobe light to produce a decisive intermittence between darkness and light. This is the same direction in which Sarra heads when painting 'from real life' inside the WAX Kultúrgyár in Budapest and the Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană in Bucharest for the exhibition Altered States – Are you Experienced? (2006–2007). Between 2006 and 2009, Sarra worked on a series of paintings entitled Psichedelyc garden, a book in which he collates a series of drawings and writings focused on the city of Pescara. In 2012, he designed Handrail for Cubist Films, inspired by Fernand Léger's 1924 film Ballet Mécanique, and the diptych Involuntary Commitment, in Rome and at Fuori Uso 2012 accompanied by a short text written by the artist: {{Quote | text = I am painting icebergs, a series of icebergs. Each of them is a still life drawing, even though it may look like an automatisme. Icebergs are wandering and solitary shapes subject to imperceptible transformation, and they incorporate other shapes and remote images. The submerged part of these ice mountains is almost completely invisible and its balance and flotation capacity is strictly connected to the emerging part. When this ration ceases to exist, icebergs can overturn with deafening sounds, showing the part which has been hidden for millennia. |character = Sergio Sarra |title = "Icebergs" (press release) |source = 24 May 2016 Traces of the theoretical processes underlying his works can be found in the short film My Painting Technique (2009, 2015). == Critical review ==