ZEITGEIST

Sabatino Cersosimo is a cultured and refined artist, as well as one of the leading figures of his generation among the large community of Italian expatriates who have settled in Berlin in recent years. He has been pursuing this research for over a decade, developing a unique and recognizable expressive style, both aesthetic and conceptual. Over the years, this research has given rise to a highly original practice, firmly rooted in a twentieth-century and contemporary Central European wave focused on pictorial realism and emotional and spiritual expression. This quest for "objectivity," a product of the twentieth-century avant-garde, takes on the form of gesture and figuration in the artist's poetics, reviving the legacy and tradition of the Italian Renaissance, through a personal reworking of art history, painting techniques, and experimentation with marks and materials. In this way, the existential urgency of accounting for one's own "zeitgeist" takes shape, that is, the ethical, cultural, aesthetic, and political climate to which individuals tend to conform, individually reworking it. Zeitgeist is the term with which German Romantic philosophy and culture have named this "essence of one's age," and which the artist has masterfully chosen as the title for this solo exhibition, which brings him back to Turin more than ten years after his last exhibition (2012). This period coincides with the beginning of that experimentation with oxidized and oil-painted steel, which has now become his stylistic hallmark, the excellent results of which we can see in the exhibition, leading him to create figurations full of meaning and symbolic allusions to the precariousness and beauty of existence. Like a Renaissance alchemist, Sabatino Cersosimo experiments with the transformation of a common and humble material like steel, through a process of deliberate and never fully controlled and controllable oxidation, into a noble medium suited to hosting the iconic figures of his time, giving life to "period paintings" that resemble medieval "gold-ground panels" or frescoes from religious tradition. These images present themselves as icons of the everyday life of a cosmopolitan generation intent on grappling with the dramas, passions, and possibilities of their time, taking on an existential and spiritual tone with a strong emotional impact. Oil painting gives life to human figures suspended, iconographically and existentially, against a metal background "eaten" and worked by the corrosion and oxidation produced by natural elements such as water and salt. A backdrop marked, almost imperceptibly, by the lines of suture and welding, upon which the painting freezes and immobilizes the forms, giving rise to a dialectic between absence and presence, nature and artifice, singularity and universality. Realist figuration, experimentation with materials, and the modernity of the language make these works a rich iconographic repertoire of faces and bodies, which interact with the cultural and artistic imagination, giving rise to representations inspired by artists like Kieslowski or mythological figures like Cassandra, which present themselves as a repertoire of the spirit of the times embodied in bodies that, in their nakedness and individuality, become emblems of an era and a socio-historical dimension. These icons of contemporaneity thus become a warning of transience, of the precariousness of individual existence, and of a cultural and social atmosphere that is characteristic of our late modern and globalized world. Roberto Mastroianni