critical anthology

[…] But ultimately, this work, we have to accept it as it is, however, now, by looking for the links, inevitably the least, within the disparity, time and ways, of an inquisitive and constantly opening up to new curiosity, towards new evidence and experiences. For over a decade, that work is marked by a variety of passages and a variety of openings and directions […] styles, gestures, signs, images, matter, and even techniques. […] Almost, then, a diary of inevitable diversity of experiences, since it is exactly a diary of deliberate different experiences. […] Di Sarro’s figurative research is constantly debating, in different ways according to the times and the situations, between experimental listening, which is almost a scientific one to wait for the sign and the matter provoked to indicate the possible image […] and otherwise between the construction of a formal hypothesis […]. And constant concern, between dreams, confession, certainty and precariousness, not only passing away as different attractions of an existential flow, but as contradictions in the present, recognizing the truest and harsh dimension of everyday existence. […] Enrico Crispolti (in E. Crispolti, Luigi Di Sarro: una ricerca interrotta, 1980)

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[…] Luigi Di Sarro’s work has something elusive about it; […] escapes any attempt to define it systematically and comprehensively. […] To comprehend this is to reach the right point of view, in order to better understand the tragic and distressing story of […] physician, teacher, artist and […] obstinate theorist of the aesthetic experience. […] his being for the experience rather than for the realm of the finite and the finished – above all, his ability as a researcher, which he continuously used in investigating the artistic language […]. Therefore, Di Sarro took is belonging to a precise historical and artistic culture as a starting point to operate on the artistic language by drawing from it primary elements – and not complex molecular unities – which would enable him to create a new artistic grammar and syntax. In these circumstances, the artist’s natural inclination could express itself fully, and, at the same time, allow the artist himself to satisfy his need to investigate art, which led him to plan his work towards a new construction of signs. […] Through this encounter the personality and the work of Luigi Di Sarro find their deepest significance and the meaning of an artistic experience which was rooted in a precise cultural context, but which also led to different and new achievements of undoubted importance. These are the moments when the artist’s creative intensity is most deeplyfelt, when the artist has absorbed and somehow forgotten everything he knows, when his hand glides freely on the surface bringing with it in a kind of oblivion everything that has been learnt. […] Filiberto Menna (in F. Menna e T. Sicoli, Luigi Di Sarro. L’opera come frammento, 1987.)

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[…] Photography, too, its practice, its use or simply its transfer, become, therefore, as in Di Sarro’s work, a moment of cognitive reflection, of analysis and research which, running parallel to the painter’s skills, blends with them in the exaltation, in the challenge, in the deflagration of a total artistic experience.
Such is the meaning, the historical meaning, not only of Di Sarro’s love of photography, but also of his whole expressive experimentalism; Di Sarro lives and researches in close relationship with other artists of his generation and of his same age or so. As it has been observed, nothing in Di Sarro ‘s work is taken for granted or is ultimately conclusive […]. It is not by accident therefore, that movement and metamorphosis […] attract ,un a specific and more steady fashion, the attention of photographer Di Sarro who almost seems to exhibit them as the symbol of his own active and restless experimentalism which looks towards history to project itself. […] Marina Miraglia (in M. Miraglia, G. Cannilla, S. Santacaterina, Luigi Di Sarro e la fotografia, 1989.)

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[…] The artist’s career now appears to us in the truly remarkable form of a “pilgrimage of the sign”. This is, in fact, the primary grammatical element that interested the painter, the link between body, language and surface. Rather than on the basis of certainties and assumptions, Di Sarro tackled this in a phenomenological spirit, putting it to the test. Each time that the pictorial language changed, the nature of the artist’s gesture altered; the style was betrayed, but the spirit of the artistic inquiry was kept alive. […] It is in the context of this setback for knowledge that artistic experimentation must take place. If the latter, as Di Sarro and the artists of the seventies led us to believe, has the task of ‘redesigning’ the world, to pur time back on the pedestal from which it has been toppled, then Di Sarro was well aware that this pedestal had been destroyed, and that it was no longer possible to speak in terms of the oneness of the ego and the world. […] Thus, the exploration of the inner recesses of language becomes a voyage into the dizzy abysses of a universe, that of art, where we must rely on our frail experience to orient ourselves. […] Lorenzo Mango (in L. Mango, Pellegrinaggio nel segno. L’avventura pittorica di Luigi Di Sarro, 1995.)

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[…] There are no more doubts: if Luigi Di Sarro, that constitutional experimenter, had not been killed at 37 years of age as a result of the wave of terrorist assassination in 1979, he would have established a direct form of osmosis between the visual arts and the cinema. Meanwhile, the movement created in photography, though originating in art and though expressing itself at the level of synchronic concentration on the photogram, tends to be articulated as a diachronic moment in a potential story (film sequence).
Actually, with his dynamic photography, Di Sarro looks very much like a standard bearer – albeit not always sufficiently aware of it – of the most advanced scenic filmography. In fact, though expressing the tendency of the age to ideologize all expressive experience, and though fully proving himself to be a militant proponent of ethically commited visuality, he unfailingly went beyond the quest for the beautiful image supported by extreme contents (Pier Paolo Pasolini), or the lyric photograms of an occasionally facile surrealism (and Fellini’s fans will, I hope, excuse me if I refer to their much praised master). […] A recurring characteristic in Di Sarro’s “film-inspired photography” is his relocations. Spatial relationships continually elude the principle of “here and now”, also owing to a dyskinesia between space and time and the ubiquitarian temptations present in a few elements in the field (through reflections, mirroring, duplications, and repetitions). These are heroic images tinged with the ideological fancies typical of the seventies, a fancy that enveloped all spontaneous energy extraneous to the object, often called performative. These are film-inspired photographs (Di Sarro had clearly expressed his intention to do cinema work); photographs which, owing to their experimental character, are still quite capable of stirring the mind and hands of operators in the field of visual and film work. […] Carmelo Strano (in C. Strano e G. Di Bert, Luigi Di Sarro. Fotografia sperimentale (tensioni filmografiche lungo gli anni ’70), 1997.)

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[…] The artist, who tried many technics and linguistic aspects, has been considered till today under the typical structural aspect of the seventies: few symbolic abstract subjects, in order to describe the presence of the activity linked to a stable time. I found interesting to make an analysis about his drawings and his graphic works in order to create a collection which concerns the approach to the realities of man and nature and the relation between them. […] it’s impossible, studying Di Sarro, not to be conscious that in this attentive explorer of the real there’s an hope, realizable only through the research. That mysticism which was present in the laical philosopher’s thought of our century, like Benjamin, Adorno, Horcheimer, and whose exponent was Gioacchino da Fiore, is also present in Luigi Di Sarro’s thought and place itself near the anxieties of renewal typical of that age, looking for other borders outside Europe, in those oriental ancient cultures and in their expressive customs still untouched. At the end of the seventies he will ask himself “can we determine the limits of the field of vision and value the changes which happen inside, if we are also indefinite and always in motion?” […] Di Sarro thinks that man like a inseparable part of universe. […] Nowadays it’s not possible to think about nature without thinking about man who controls it giving it a form: the formalities can be different and yet determined or not by a basic ethics. Luigi Di Sarro felt that an aesthetics (a system of signs which indicate the beauty) cannot be devided by an ethics, by a moral system applied to life; as well as he didn’t believe in the canons of beauty features, he should have had some doubts on the ethic entity of the world which surrounded him. So he was thinking about a project of transformation, aimed to include various elements. […] Di Sarro was above all interested in the connexions between things, the different measures, the purposes and possibilities which are present everywhere in the cosm. He used to declare himself sensitive to the theories of the chaos and considered them as a great stimulus to the disposition of things and to the possibility of renewal, and to find again an order. He was fascinated by nature for its simplicity of rules which compose it, both in vegetable and animal species: he liked the order of nature. […] Di Sarro has been not only a scrupulous researcher of the physical/psychical components of nature, but he also created his theory in other fields and tried artistical abstract and symbolical dimensions which show a rarefaction of the main structure. He found in nature a capability of observation and registration which is the sensitive support of everyelse operative dimension of thought. […] Federica Di Castro (in F. Di Castro, Fisionomie dell’universo. Luigi Di Sarro/Disegno e teoria, 1998; in F. Di Castro, L’idea espansa. Un percorso critico nell’arte del Novecento, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, 2012.)
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[…] But what is experimentalism if not the result of a process originated by an idea? The dynamic and inaccurate photos by Bragaglia or the stroboscopic photos, the chronographic photos or the ‘body’ sequences by Luigi Di Sarro, can be considered as part of this process. These images are in the first place results not “proofs” as experimentations are generally considered. Experimentation is related to the process of doing. One does not know where it will take us or when it will end though hopefully it will never end, because each phase of this process is already a result. […] Luigi Di Sarro – photographer, has achieved his visual ritual with an extraordinary expressiveness, full of irony and dramatic at the same time, disquieting in the series of the “broken doll”, or the nude masked by a net, or the gesture of the cat. The theatricality of the self portraits – a physiognomic research of himself – the endless sequence of a dancing nude, the tragic embrace of the mannequins, the amazing light […]. Italo Zannier (in I. Zannier, Luigi Di Sarro. Alla scoperta della fotografia, 2001.)

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[…] One of central themes of the culture of those years, and a aspect of Di Sarro’s work which is embedded in his feverish experimenting, was the attention given to natural and artificial morphology, to the methods of experimental psychology and the terms of an alternative technology based on the union of biological morphology, the atom, and electromagnetic fields, which contributed to a vision of the world where the core of Oriental philosophies, which the artist was attracted to, met with one of the most forceful revelations of modern physics which intrigued him most. The vision was that of a fundamental unity of the universe, of the relationship between things and events, where nothing is isolated and everything becomes in a reciprocal way, part of everything else. The ways of art and science were for him primarily concerned with the heart. An ethical, existential choice, oriented towards a spiritual awareness and self-realisation, and an apotropaic act towards humanity. “Sociology and anthropology and the technological developments in communication and information have created a collective conscience which poses qualitative problems concerning the nature of a fruitful coexistence, where relationships and mutual functions are elevated … Perhaps it will be computers with their powerful memory and the speed of their associations that will bring back the possibility of an intelligent programming for the future”. An aesthetic testimony which asks problematic questions more than gives reassuring answers and predates some contemporary avant-garde positions, bypassing any aseptic conceptualism and the technocratic and specialized neo-positivist vision which, in a certain way, decreed to decline of the role of the intellectual in society, and which today corresponds with a line of thought which veers towards contamination, the search for relations between diverse visions of the world, different cultures, between areas of knowledge and learning which were, until yesterday, deemed incompatible. A line of thought that, while taking differences on board, develops human values. Di Sarro foresaw the advent of a modern humanism by looking back to Leonardo’s example, which is today honoured by statements issued by scientists of the Massachusset Institute of Technology, that mythical American temple to technologies which Di Sarro was already following with interest, together with the essence of a filtered and purified postmodernism which comes out of a chaotic babble of languages in wiew on auspicious coexistence of truths within the bounds of a reality in a state of becoming. […] Patrizia Ferri (in P. Ferri, “Politica di pace”. Luigi Di Sarro – New York 1971, 2002.
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[…] What is fascinating in Di Sarro’s work is the extraordinary freedom with which he was able to position himself outside and beyond a conventional vision of art, rejecting stereotypes and above all the regimentation in predefined poetics. […] Luigi Di Sarro belonged to that generation of utopian artists which with varying fortune passed through the middle of the 1960’s and the entire decade of the 1970’s. A generation convinced that art had to both take hold of and be responsible for a radical project of change of its languages and of the world as a whole. […] All of the counterculture of those years fueled this utopia […] Poetry-Show, the juvenile movements intercepted antagonistic thought, the metropolitan ‘Indians’ gave the wink to the feminists. In the midst of the dreams of a revolution also other interests came to the surface for alternative disciplines: macrobiotics, astrology, oriental philosophies and also Chinese medicine like acupuncture – all forming part of the counter-thinking which also imbued lifestyles. Di Sarro was permeated by this cultural atmosphere […] For Di Sarro knowledge and science were testing grounds for proving theoretical models and carrying out their experimental verification. From the 1960’s he created some works in which the sign element predominated, at the limit of Minimalism. At the Roman gallery Ferro di Cavallo in May 1971 for the first time he exhibited some sculptures in filiform iron – minimal, extremely rigorous and absolute. Also poor materials fascinated him: wire mesh, metal, iron wire, string and polystyrene. The surface in its bidimensionality was questioned, rendered plastic with the addition of extra-pictorial materials, ready-mades, residues of production in series, and yet violated in is integrity, cut and torn towards the outside to create openings not only in the canvas but even in the paper of his cartographic work. […] Images are a form of thought and Di Sarro experimented their cognitive scope,’segmenting’ their meanings, organizing their sense, transforming ideas into facts and perceivable things. […] Tonino Sicoli (in A. Capasso e T. Sicoli, Luigi Di Sarro. L’anatomia dell’arte, 2005.)

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[…] The artist’s working life was brief but astonishingly intense. It was characterised, above all, by an alterity that set him apart from the ordinary trends of artistic debate, themselves particularly vivid and turbulent at that time. This makes him difficult to place alongside others like […]  Claudio Cintoli, and Fernando Tonello, since he was not conceded the time to take on a definitive expressive character or an inescapable historical significance. […] Unconcerned with giving himself a recognizable mark of expression, he was firmly convinced that it was no longer a question of style or manner, interpreting his own role right from the start as that of the pure experimenter. He was concerned solely with the intensity of his work and his intellectual sharpness, despite the suspicion that the professional spheres of the vanguard reserved for an artist with an atypical training, and the no less tenacious suspicion held by the art system towards brilliant spirits unheeding of the rules and regulations of the new, wich were, as we now know, no less inflexible than those of the old academic ones.
Di Sarro clearly demonstrated that he took little notice of his, embodying on the Roman scene during the 60s and 70s the role of experimenter whose work in progress was an undertaking without rhetoric, an experience of life. […] Flaminio Gualdoni ( F. Gualdoni, per Luigi Di Sarro in Luigi Di Sarro, Edizioni Peccolo, 2008.)

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[…] The traces of Di Sarro’s work reveal a creative flexibility, a capacity to bounce from one solution to the other by coagulating into elusive works to the usual ordinator setting to which they are accustomed. Tension to the freedom of doing that moves from a craving of knowledge that is not only destined to art, but through it comes to formulate questions about reality. Di Sarro’s activity is a research act, a tool and a way to deepen his being in the world, enhanced by the ability to break disciplinary boundaries, but instead of interacting. The interest in music, science and technology is a test and part of its cultural matrix. Every form of expression is shaped according to its natural need to understand and his overwhelming will to investigate, avoiding falling back on a single Direction of thought. […] The fluid search for Di Sarro is also the courage to not passively accept a certain and consolidated idea of ​​art […] Angelo Capasso (in A. Capasso, L’orlo del vuoto. Vita, morte e arte di Luigi Di Sarro, 2008.)