Sergio Fermariello
After interrupting his university studies in Natural Sciences to devote himself exclusively to drawing and painting, Sergio Fermariello (Naples, 1961) initially recovered the familiar visual lexicon, in an attempt to capture time and memory. In the mid-eighties the drawing tends to grainy images, loses focus on the object, liquidates its intimate narratives with forced blow-up work, making "the form invisible and the content empty", as the author declares. 'artist.
What remains is a repeated sign, obstinate in its fixation, which continues to scratch the paper by inertia and from which the warrior will emerge, an icon that will accompany Fermariello's work up to the most recent works, including Guerrieri-writing (2017), entered the collection of MADRE.
Starting from a sign, a tiny pictogram recognizable in the stylized figure of a warrior obsessively repeated, the artist creates "unlimited writing", covering the entire surface of the canvas.
Fermariello defines himself as a "writer of a single word" which, starting from the shorthand signifier of the warrior alone, he repeats like a mantra, nullifying any other hermeneutic attempt at interpretation. And, in fact, in his work the sign does not refer to another sign, but is reiterated in its own semantic self-referentiality. Like a Zen monk, the artist cultivates the sign by creating a linguistic short circuit that refers to "the inarticulate cry of the origins and the end of his dialological presumptions", explains the artist.
In 1989 Fermariello received his first important recognition with the Saatchi & Saatchi international prize for young artists in Milan.
