Art is essential - Vieri Sorrentino
Vieri Sorrentino, an emerging Italian painter, has made art his only reason for living and has a very clear and precise vision of art and its concrete role in our life.
When and how did your artistic career begin?
I began to embrace the desire to make painting my work in the last years of high school, despite my scientific high school background.
In the fifth grade I was deeply influenced by the book “Concerning the spiritual in art” by Wassily Kandinsky, a book that I am still re-reading and rediscovering with pleasure and presenting intense, bold and extremely poetic words, with continuous references to the ego and art as an expression of one's inner life. I thought these thoughts fit me perfectly.
I could also see his works live in Paris the same year with the school at the Pompidou museum, as well as those by many other modern art exponents.
In those years, still unsure about the future to be undertaken, I was very influenced by the lives and thoughts of many painters of the last two centuries, I remember having seen in their lives a wisdom and a unique passion that recalled something in me of which I didn't know the existence, it was like a natural call to which instinct responds.
Their lives seemed to me the most beautiful and noble we could interpret, and I was lucky enough to be able to undertake this risky journey.
What do you want to express through your art?
I want to change the way people see, to influence the present to redirect them to another direction than the one they are taking.
Consequently I want to express my vision of the world, my vision of the future, to make people aware of what we are and what we could be.
Our present is a materialistic age, superficial, pragmatic, greedy for what we can touch, on social networks we seek approval because many of us share a deep insecurity in ourselves and I find that this is inconceivable, we depend on our watches. From our mirrors.
Despite this, the present is capable of providing culture and knowledge within everyone's reach and technology is constantly evolving, we are developing a lot on a practical level, but our spirit is affected.
This is why I think there is an extreme need for what I can say, I believe this is a lack to which art must respond. In my conception art, although useless on a practical level in everyday life, in a larger picture is an essential tool to guide humanity, even more than science or philosophy.
Where do you get the most inspiration from?
Traveling is a great source of inspiration, there are so many incentives to lose count.
As far as possible. Getting in touch with different cultures is something that opens your eyes to the reality of the world.
The essential thing is having relationships with external reality, even going out for a walk, observing people and asking about their lives, observing and interacting.
Another thing that inspires me a lot is thinking about the future, what can I do to have an impact on the present projecting myself in years, centuries ahead, millennia, millions of years ahead.
Even seeing the works of great artists is always a panacea.
In any case, the inspiration is potentially everywhere, even in a graphic novel or in a movie, it's up to you to see it.
How would you define your pictorial style?
Actually I find that the concept of style is a limitation, it is something that Kandisky also talks about. In art the search for style is not only useless but it does not even have that great meaning attributed to it today. The affinity between the works does not consist in something external, superficial, but in the root of the roots: in the mystical content of art. These are his words.
If I try to concentrate on this or that style I would end up forcing my spontaneity, instead I try to evolve continuously in all possible directions, to trespass as much as possible and without limits according to my instinct beyond thought.
However it is among the various aesthetic tendencies that I have crossed the one I am most satisfied with and that I continue to pursue the most is the representation of cities and metropolises full of colors, with many bright and sparkling shades, rich in nature.
Do you have any advice to improve creative thinking?
I think we have to be extremely open, without thinking of having a ready answer for everything and being ready to evolve, to put and to doubt and to ask ourselves. Don't detract from the importance of the paradox.
Putting logic on the same level as instinct and the unconscious, at night we dream and dreams are generated by us, it's all there, just don't block it. We do not realize it but in us there is much more creativity than the one in the brain side that analyzes it.
Doing new things helps, avoiding the routine as much as possible, inserting new stimuli, watching films or reading books that can inspire us and that we wouldn't find if we didn't look for them, in black and white, with extravagant plots, breaking the ordinary normality.
How does the environment around you affect your art?
The right environment is fundamental, I need a city that knows how to give me what I need and that is on my wavelength, in which there are people who allow me to express myself better, the reality that surrounds us deeply affects us.
But above all it helps me to change environment: any place you live in the long run loses intensity and novelty, I would like to be able to live in a much more nomadic way, to continuously renew the external environment.
An external environment with the right cultural stimuli is essential.
What is your next project?
I'm working on more or less related ideas.
I have the idea to create an artistic comic, in which to propose some of my ideas on how to affect the present, I will get there in a few lines.
Among my various experiments I am working on spatial landscapes with arbitrary physical rules on the projection of light onto bodies and with unnatural colors that seem to come from another planet.
But my real project is one and it is extremely ambitious.
I think it will take me a lifetime to make it happen and maybe it won't be enough either.
I want to give life to the visions that I paint by influencing the architecture of the future in a decisive way, as well as the conception of cities as we know them: a living architecture, which distorts the classical conception of architecture and the metropolis-city in a definitive way. It is the quintessence of ecology: I want to create and guide the creation of what I call “city-forest”:cities studied on the basis of the pre-existing landscape and that they assimilate, that change with it, without cement, with a large number of piers at most levels that allow you to see the horizon from the city center, undoubtedly without cars.
Someone could say that nature itself is its architect, in this sense I speak of living architecture. Rich in fauna and flora, with sensory stimuli (think of the scent of flowers) that soften those who populate them, with a blaze of colors given by the great variety of plants.
I do not want to dwell, but I believe that we are moving towards this direction in small steps, there are many examples: Gaudi talked about it, Viennese architect Hunderwasser spoke about it, another architect named Callebaut is still working in this direction, although with different criteria, I invite you to look for some of his projects online.
Oslo is the first major city that abolished cars at the beginning of 2019.
Small communities of wealthy and healthy people are rising and have moved to live in the woods, look at the city of tree houses in Piedmont.
They are just signals but they are there today, now.
To act drastically on our production of CO2 is imperative, but I look further, and at least drastically. I am convinced that technological innovation can and must seek a much more visceral and symbiotic relationship with nature.
Quoting the prophecy of Antoni Gaudi: The angles will disappear and the matter will reveal its astral roundness; the sun will penetrate in all directions: it will be the representation of paradise.
