Emiliania Mongiat, 2015

The exhibition “Figural Traces,” organized in Tricasa at the Atrium Casa di Betania Hospice, is indicative of that interest in humanity, even in suffering, which is often found in art. It’s in the direct communicative capacity that works present through the language of shapes and colors, in their push to

forget the concrete, the daily pain, to find breath in different dimensions. And this is even more true when the works are those of Luigi Sergi, who with visible and hidden meanings - of shapes and colors - has constructed his own language, inserting it into a personal artistic research initiated in the early 1980s and continually pursued. His works, in fact, over time, have become increasingly conceptual as the folds, relief traces, and swellings have appeared ever more subtle, more delicate: no longer objects and materials hiding beneath painted surfaces on canvas, but engravings, signs, delicate textures, barely hinted at, visible only by the effect of light, as if the texture of things belonging to everyday life has been replaced by the weaves of thoughts, by the lightness of water and sea foam, of “his” sea. A painting that, while continuing to investigate the effects of “revealing” and “concealing,” of the known and the unknown, the past and the present, has increasingly taken into consideration the meaning of colors, their ability to communicate emotional sensations rooted in ancient and recent symbolism. Thus, in Sergi’s works, reds and blues (war and peace, fire and water, anguish and calm) now contrast with bright and well-defined areas, now unify into violet areas, now mix to give life to compositions in which the graphic tensions made of signs, cuts, engravings become increasingly “figural traces,” elements of that personal alphabet with which the artist manages to build a visual language capable of conversing with the deepest and hidden areas of the souls.