Giovanni Quaglino, 1984

“Illusionistically manipulated surfaces are not (as might appear at first glance) merely a pretext for formal exploration or a curious and heterodox synthesis of realism and abstraction. Instead, they embody the full ambiguity of a painting process that, while tending toward the zero degree of pure light and colour effects, seeks a new semantic status. We then begin to understand that for Sergi, art is not and cannot be solely formal exploration, but becomes an expression of material and spiritual tensions and impulses from which the artist cannot extricate himself through a detached and purely aesthetic vision. In this respect, Sergi connects to the great and still vital current of Expressionism, but an Expressionism that has renounced didactic attitudes, the explicitness of ideology or a ‘message,’ to capture, in the pure state of creativity, the formal essence that recurs beyond historical situations and contingencies. This aspect of his art is directly related to his previous parallel activity as a sculptor, in which the same poetic dynamic can be traced. Yet Sergi does not abandon the modern need to find a system of balance, a structure that can provide a rational interpretation of events. The geometric frameworks, the colour fields, which always highlight and limit the expressive tensions in his works, are certainly to be attributed to a very personal reinterpretation of Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction, but also represent an intimate need for balance, for harmonious transcendence of emotional outbursts. In other words, they represent the desire to move beyond the moment of iconoclastic fragmentation and declared incommunicability, to lay the foundations for a new possibility of communication and shared understanding of reality. In this sense,

even his recent ‘sculpto-paintings’ demonstrate an interest in nullifying the canonical distinction of the arts in favour of a total artistic experience, perhaps intended as a formal premise for a new, unprecedented classicism. Sergi (along with others, albeit not many, young artists who are not seduced by postmodern trends) seems to want to move in this direction: the work of these young artists and their future developments hold the possibilities for the renewal of contemporary art.”