il Sonno Aureo: Alessandro Sicioldr

Alessandro Sicioldr's journey continues as it reaches this third stage, closing a triptych that began in 2022 with "Il Maestro, la Voce, la Luce" and continued in 2023 with "Il sogno dell’annuncio". Now it is the turn of "il Sonno Aureo". Titles matter in Sicioldr's world, and although they stand in harmonious uniformity with one another, a progression can be grasped.

From the luminous and verbal evocation of the first exhibition, the artist has moved on to the recording of an anticipatory vision and now arrives at a pictorial nirvana well symbolized by the 2024 canvas that gave the exhibition its title. Mind you, the progression should not be understood as an evolution: Sicioldr's painting style does not change, as it was already consciously established in the works of the first act of this triptych. The exhibition gives further confirmation of his formidable and bewitching expertise, without the hassle of searching for changes or novelty of solutions. The progression should be understood exclusively as a further delving into the world to which Sicioldr feels drawn, to which he feels he belongs as an artist.

In his creative dynamics, titles represent the last act; only at the conclusion of the work does the painting receive the seal of the name that was not thought of or planned before, because it is the painting itself that suggests it, almost dictates it once it is taken off the easel. Before that moment, the artist is subsumed into another space, populated with visions that his mind, and then also his hand, are called upon to organize and explicate in images, without this unraveling the knots of the enigmas that the visions contain. The title comes at the end, to seal images formed regardless and arising from immersion in the ungovernable dimension of the unconscious.

In the exhibition we find two types of compositions: the most common is the complex and imponderable one of the larger canvases. Added to this typology is another, with much more simplified construction, which sees a unique character on the canvas scene, endowed with an icastic energy. They are figures who attract with the magnetism of their gazes, stand on a threshold, as if called to guard what lies beyond or to watch that those about to cross the threshold are ready for the step. In fact, to be ready one must abandon the temptation or pretense of framing within rational schemes what one will see. Thus, in a hypothetical narrative montage of the exhibition's itinerary, one can imagine that "Il Guardiano della Porta Rossa", albeit in the small size of a 30x20 canvas, with its scrutinizing gaze and neo-jewish grandeur, watches over the passage opening behind it without making concessions.

What is there to protect beyond that threshold? There is to safeguard the precious universe of sleep. Throughout his journey Sicioldr has established a relationship of familiarity with this universe, an attitude that has made it possible for him to return it in images and in stories. I believe that at the basis of this relationship is the observance of a covenant: Sicioldr welcomes what goes up from the depths of his unconscious without ever making any claim to interpret it or to derive meanings or messages from it. It is an attitude opposite to that of the great Surrealist tradition, where the dream universe was often used as a club to break down taboos and therefore obeyed an all-out destabilizing logic. The images however enigmatic were born to be subjected to a process of unraveling.

Instead, Sicioldr is carried away by the emergence of these never-planned images and lives with them without asking them for the reason for the gestures or explanation of the rituals they are enacting. He also deals with the accumulation of situations that can sometimes expose him to compositional problems: emblematic of the whole path is the large canvas of no less than five meters in length that Sicioldr presents on this occasion but whose work began as early as 2020. "Il Canto dei Folli" is a vast container in which dozens and dozens of creatures emerged from the deep, without any decipherable order for us; they crowd the canvas, enacting actions and gestures whose reasons are not given to us to understand. We are as if in front of a movie screen on which all the protagonists, heroes and extras alike, indiscriminately and even harmoniously, have arranged themselves, without any script providing for it. There is a film clip in which the artist can be seen walking back and forth in front of this canvas hanging in his studio when the work is finished: rather than a focus on the outcome of the work, his seems to be a still exploratory gaze, as if to discover what he sees populating the painting, which he should nevertheless know well having patiently made it. The title affixed to the work is indicative. The protagonists are the "Folli", “Fools”, (whose dignity is underscored by the capitalization): they are therefore creatures who have proudly enfranchised themselves from the mental and psychic enclosure of rationality and who claim this nature of theirs that cannot be framed or ascribed to symbologies. We do not hear their "Canto", “Singing”, (this element is also remarked in the title with a capital letter) but we sense a sonic fluid that pervades their relationships. It is an enchanted fluid that dissolves contrasts and in which even the energies of evil seem to dissolve. This explains why their nature contaminated by hybridizations, the imbalance of proportions that differentiate them macroscopically, and the phantasmal aspect that marks their looks do not determine in us a feeling of disquiet. They are creatures of a world we do not know and who elude all our attempts to domesticate them through an interpretive process, but whom we do not feel at all as hostile creatures, thanks to that harmonious soul of theirs. Rather, we sense an attitude of sympathy in this acceptance of their unveiling and lowering themselves into a world that has no time, but which is certainly our time: the choice of the mountain landscape in the background, a choice that we see renewed in other works in the exhibition as well, such as in the fascinating "Il Santo," creates a short-circuit, thanks to which what we think belongs and happens in another and distant world is instead close, treads the same ground we have under our feet and takes place under the same skies, sometimes serene, sometimes cloud-hazed.

Sicioldr's painting, through the cycle of these three exhibitions, has gradually made the alienating universe of dreams more and more familiar and friendly. That is why "il Sonno Aureo", “Sleep is Golden”.  It returns to be so as it had happened in so many extraordinary episodes that have marked the history of art. Let me here briefly mention two of them, works by two giants, which Sicioldr undoubtedly watched with devotion and even "absorbed": the sleep of Constantine by Piero in Arezzo and the sleep of Innocent III by Giotto in Assisi. "Golden" sleeps because they were bearers of a wisdom that suggested solutions outside of calculations and rules.

These are not casual references, but useful in understanding the formal horizon on which Sicioldr has chosen to position himself. The artist's works are marked by a neo-fourcentism, supported by an extraordinary, necessary painterly skill. In Sicioldr's system of work, the first step is that of watercolour "sketches" on paper where images ascended from the unconscious, often suggested by dreams made, are quickly but already noted with remarkable precision. This initial consolidation then allows the painting to proceed with the necessary and patient time to return those images fully, while remaining true to their estranged nature. In short, the formal choice is substantial, because the constraints of such a strict discipline block any feeling of arbitrariness. It is a painting that finds in "craft" the way of being fully respectful towards the subjects it brings to the canvas. And that guarantees a degree of objectivity to visions that could be summarily categorized as figments of the imagination. Instead, they are the fruit of golden sleeps that require that painting, too, be endowed with a golden standard.