Sangalli's Theory: My Philosophy and interview on Artist Mariano Sangalli

 

I want to say thank you to Mariano Sangalli for taking the time to help accomplish the bridging of my questions with personal answers.

The aim of this Essay and Interview with Mariano Sangalli is to share my philosophies and beliefs on an artist I have collected and have visually fallen in love with. When I was setting up the Zoharks Gallery for the “08+08” exhibition I could not help but question the senses I kept feeling when looking back on what I had collected from the artist so I wanted to pick Mariano’s brain.

Exploration of similarities and differences.

They say photography is the sister of cinema, I insert in that Mariano Sangalli would be the brother of creating cinema-like feelings but with a canvas creating scenes as if it was stop-motion. This makes me question the complexity of what makes a still image and what is considered a moving picture when something is still but flows like a stream of water moving quietly and undetected.

Sangalli’s work seems to seek different cognitive capacities and senses: 

mortality, Emotion, Truth.

Momento 00 by Mariano Sangalli

This is where my mind takes me and signals to me when looking at the pieces by Sangalli. As a jazz lover and art lover I made an argument that we can no longer compare art to jazz. With new innovations, we are forced to move to a different type of beat, I believe the beat is moving at the speed of electronic music or a Hans Zimmer soundtrack

I find myself contradicting myself after hours of listening to Hans Zimmer while looking over some of the works of Sangalli, with each track and some repeated tracks. I found myself with the thesis that Sangalli has the same philosophical landscape and tempo as performing arts.

When I looked at works like “Corporeity: by Mariano Sangalli and Sonia Perez, I could not help but look at the art piece as a contemporary performance that is conceived as an NFT.

Corporeity by Mariano Sangalli and Sonia Perez

 

“Inside” was a piece that made me reflect on my personal life and asked myself about the things I once doubted about myself, relationships, and hardships that were faced in life. It was almost as if the more I went through artworks, the more I felt like I was in a therapy session between my conscious thoughts, my reflections, and the artworks which created a connection that was built through every single piece.

Inside by Mariano Sangalli

My connection became so strong that I decided to interview Mariano Sangalli, for who I am grateful and thankful for spending the time answering each question to make this reading possible.

Is there anything you want to show to people when you create a piece?

no, or at least not something specific, I only try to generate an evocation, a sensation of space, and an empty narrative, so that the viewer can complete it. you could say that it is a container that the viewer fills.

Whenever I look at your works of art I feel the story being told, do you feel there’s intent in telling the story or is it for the viewer to see the story told?

I think I answered part of this answer before, but to go deeper, I could say that I leave structures of a story that is not told so that the viewer can finish building it with his own story. I try to balance evocation and narrative, which sometimes come out and sometimes do not.

small paintings 3 by Mariano Sangalli

What are the little things you enjoy in life?

The little things in life? a complex question. what is small and what is big? hehe, I guess I could sum it up in the detail. I enjoy being able to appreciate the details, the little things. a leaf that moves in the wind, a little ornament in some new place I see, that kind of thing

How easy is it for an artist of caliber to bridge and reflect between your past, present, and what you see in the future? 

about the past and the present I could say that it is not easy, but it is an interesting exercise, every few periods (once or twice a year) I display all my works in the workshop, to see what they tell me about what I have already done and what I am doing now, and every time I do it I find new things. I am in a constant dialectic exercise between the past and the present of what I do. and in relation to the future, it is totally uncertain for me because I don't know how my work can be modified in the future, what new techniques or crafts I will learn. To give you an example, getting into digital art and NFT has changed considerably my way of working.

Who is the one artist who spoke to you through visual representation?

With this question you mean who are my visual references? sorry if I don't understand it, english is not my native language and maybe I miss some subtleties of the language. In case you mean my references, I could name some that come to my mind at this moment. Louise Bourgeois , Michaël Borremans, Lucian Freud, Bruno Walpoth, Gideon kiefer, Bill Viola, Pina Bausch

Functioning in New Climates: A Call to My Fellow Artist

 

ROME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, THE START OF A MODERN-DAY DIGITAL RENAISSANCE

I recently caught myself diving into the depths of art, visual culture, and the understanding of how the renaissance is constantly being reflected in our current art world now (I suggest these depths not be entered), I have also been reading a book called “Nothing if Not Critical” by Robert Hughes. I think the critic he was and the criticism he shared was so valuable to the art world, including myself, as he has opened my mind to scale when it came to understanding the arts and how I go about unpacking my personal theories I take on dates.

Robert Hughes was a firm believer that the culture of politics, economics, and mass media ruins art he also felt strongly that the late modern collections from Canberra to Minneapolis to Venice were all purchased from the same menu. I always wonder if this correlates to how Alberti felt when he stood tall against the art patrons about the uses of gold and promoting majesty.

The Italian Renaissance was attached to the prestige of Roman and Greek cultures where words, paintings, and sculptures were weighed so heavily because of the intent behind wanting to represent a time of shared pearls of wisdom. The digital art world is promoting the same prestige due to the force of outside societies but having the willingness to share practices that have been around since the first computer was made while their intent remains mindful.

ARTISTS HAVE WHAT THE AVERAGE PERSON COULD TEND TO NOT HAVE AND THAT IS FUNCTION. (Something like an exponent)

What is your function as an artist?

You should not confuse this with “what utility does your work possess” or “finding ways to describe what your art means”. This is about what degree an artist stands for and what he or she believes and how they go about using their tools to provide. I sent out a tweet that was on how our digital visual language is officially representing how we are and where we are in the world. This was a standing point on the term “Bourgeois Art” created by Peter Burger which reflects on a broad conceptual framework, which views artistic developments as being driven ultimately by social and economic change.

https://twitter.com/stevejobsmydad/status/1637131213889568769?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1637131213889568769%7Ctwgr%5Ef91ec242f391109c1125a1c1bb1fb2ffbeead76f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fzoharks.beehiiv.com%2Fp%2Fzoharksdefiningart

How would you define 'art'?

 

Defining Art for Our Future

For many people art is a specific thing; a painting, sculpture or photograph, a dance, a poem or a play. It is all of these things and more. They are mediums of artistic expression.

Webster's New Collegiate dictionary defines art as the "conscious use of skill and creative imagination, especially in the production of aesthetic objects". Yet art is much more than a medium or words on a page. It is the expression of our experience.

Josh Brodsky's Definition of art:

I see that translated into the NFT world. The same world that has grown, I have watched and taken notes on.

Art is uniquely human and tied directly into the culture, taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary.

The meaning of beauty and the human condition art is an expressive medium with codes in place that allows us to experience feelings rather it is joy, deep sorrow, or confusion.

It cracks the code on time connecting us to the past reflecting the present and anticipating the future

Form and content:

Form: The physical and visible characteristics inherent in works of art

Content: the meaning we derive from them

Formal distinctions include a work’s size, medium (painting, drawing, sculpture, or other kinds of work), and descriptions of compositional elements, such as the lines shapes, and colors involved.

Content distinctions include b. Content

There is less consensus here. Some distinguish "subject matter" from "content" - - i.e., denotations. connotations, more or less

• while others prefer terms like "meaning" vs. "significance." Semiotics and post-structuralism go even farther, well beyond what can be introduced here. To simplify matters, content means "message," however that message may be organized. A traditional way of organizing content was simply to place it in basic categories of iconography (signs, symbols, conventions, etc.) called genres, listed here in what was once considered a descending order of importance:

History: important incidents like famous battles, political triumphs, social movements, etc

Megalography: the portrayal of historically important people or things in an absurdly glorifying manner, as if they weren’t really human or ordinary at all.

Mythology: stories of gods, goddesses, nymphs and heroes, usually (but not exclusively) Greek or Roman in origin

Religion: the portrayal of sacred narratives and legends from the worlds holy texts

Portraiture: likenesses of real people, usually (but not exclusively) of at at-least moderate social standing

Landscape: representations of places urban and rural whether real or imagined

Genre: not to be confused with “genres"( the categories in general), the portrayal of scenes of everyday life, including people but not specifically for the purposes of portraiture

Still-life: objects, furniture, settings, utensils, flowers, food, etc without obvious stories or important people

Rhopography: trash, rubbish, waste

Issues of content include any visit to Al clubs that provide an understanding of what the art tells us. Sometimes an artwork's content is vague or hidden and needs more information that is present in the work itself. Ultimately these two terms are roped together in the climb to understand what art has to offer to us

Aesthetics in the world of art is a philosophical argument about the beauty of the work of art in its current nature of it.

Art is embedded in the fabric of our lives, it is still the source of controversy and irony. Thriving in common experiences yet contradicting the ideas of ourselves.

Art is part of the culture it’s created in,, but can reflect many cultures at once where one might stand in the present time Art has become even more complex when it comes to the use of imagery, mediums, and meanings. We need to access visual information unlocking it for our society from past cultures we have grown in living it in our current world or cultures unknown to most of the world

Art is a society of core thinkers that shape culture and humanity in a sense that scares those of great power using its soft power. The ability to be a free-floater thinker that can strike with a sense of charisma that shapes people to become a follower or a collector of one’s work is very impactful.

Art can not be weighed because of its ability to evolve on micro-economic scales and still not having a true measurement of its importance is truly influential.