VACUUM

RESIZED – Post-corona symptoms in sculpture

Italian/Hungarian sculptor and visual artist Sara Berti’s small, vacuumed works carry the remains of a period, that was based less on materiality or visibility than immateriality, spacelessness and invisibility – the corona era (2020-2022). Isolated in her house because of the corona, Berti’s work took place in the corners of the house, in the kitchen, and other spaces, where space was limited, and where her presence was suddenly 24/7. Like many others, whose work faced an unexpected shrinking, Berti’s materials also found new connections to the home where she worked, from the plastics used to the vacuum’s where they are packed, like meats in the refrigerator. In Resized the focus is though not in size itself, nor the material turn, but in the new life of the sculpture – and the look at this historical moment, when sculptors faced challenges with working space and mobility. It is like their nature would be about condensation, their colours about the colours of the kitchen and their feel about the feel we face in the supermarkets – without them, still, losing the symbolical weight, language and/or artistic nature. Abstract they come, the messengers of the early 2020s, speaking to our already hidden resources of corona humanity. We all resized our space for a while and created new dimensions for life. Let the sculptures of that period speak to us now!

Max Ryynänen

Senior Lecturer of Theory of Visual Culture, Aalto University

For Sara Berti, the language of art is a privileged medium for ‘reading’; the world, for making contact with herself and the reality and society she lives in.

Through the tension between traditional and contemporary, thought and matter, different cultures known directly, the artist seeks to capture the vital energy, bearing witness to her being there and to the continuous mutation of reality. In her artistic practice, her complex yet transparent personality, her passionate adherence to life, her feeling of man, collectivity and society as one finds full expression. Sara Berti’s work eludes all conventional categorisation: her sculpture draws arcs and straight lines in open space; her painting creates three-dimensional perceptions through superimpositions of decisive and vigorous signs and colours. The agile, dynamic bronze bodies, which inhabit free space, elsewhere are enclosed, in a vacuum, in membranes that isolate them from society; in the Vacuum series, the figures painted in the background are negated by strong pictorial signs superimposed on the transparent surface that encloses them. Simulacra of imprisoned bodies and faces just as the pandemic has segregated us all from the outside world that tell of a resistance of form in an alternation of sensations and emotional stimuli that carry with them the artist’s poetic feeling.

The human figure is at the centre of Sara Berti’s research, but with a very particular slant: it is the artist’s primary confrontation with the world, an instrument of knowledge and privileged place of expression. In her figures, the classical feeling is translated into harmony of form, the right balance among the parts and a great simplicity in the name of which the artist sacrifices every narrative detail.

Since the end of the last century, the depiction of the body is no longer experienced by artists as a static formal canon of beauty, but becomes an ‘expressive’ element of a vision of the world and existence, an external testimony of an inner condition and a privileged place for the search for an identity. The beauty of the body therefore gives way to the expressive possibilities of the body. Fascinating and evocative, Sara Berti’s works present a synthesis of the human figure; in refined and longlinear forms, the artist stages a sort of visual synecdoche, ”quot;pars pro toto”; that poetically restores an idea of the image of man of great lyrical force and profound existential enquiry.

The interest in materials and the expressive possibilities of their combination became, over the years, a privileged path for the artist, who experimented with their potentials (capabilities) in a series of works with a more geometrically defined structure. But this is a very particular esprit de geomeìtrie, in which the rationality of the mind is confronted with the emotionality of the heart, the certainty of forms with the intrinsic ambiguity of materials, the full presence of ‘objects’; and their evocation through symbols. Sara Berti’s artistic language, multiform over the years and in continuous progress, is played out on these substantial choices, the artist has never failed to make, and which perceptibly mark her path, first and foremost the strong link to her own cultural roots in continuous and happy dialogue with the stimuli provoked by encounters with other cultures. Her poetic world lives in a dimension of space, memory, materials and colour. A dimension populated by safe but changeable forms, which are arranged on the surface to meet space and light, which modify their structure, making their surfaces vibrate. In her works, we seem to hear the call of a sort of ancestral symbolic rituality, which the artist evokes and updates, inserting it into the most vivid contemporaneity through a mental ‘order’ that supports the theoretical framework of the work but which an underlying spirituality transforms into poetic emotion.

Silvia Evangelisti

(Bologna University)

Sara Berti, during the corona period (2020-2022), develops a specific relationship towards her own art and reality in general, which is manifested in her ability to create an autonomous space uncontaminated by external influences.

By strategically placing figures within an abstract environment, similar to the one we collectively found ourselves in during the pandemic, Berti delicately treats the space of artistic activity within a safe envelope.

This so-called packaging is similar to those of organic products in supermarkets that have an extended or unlimited shelf life. It’s as if the artist is telling us that our fear of death and endangerment of that fragile and perishable body is just as unnatural and bizarre as the system that nurtures, promotes and evaluates it.

Her artistic practice goes beyond the boundaries of the physical exterior and provokes the limits of comfort. Berti uses the medium of painting from the perspective of a sculptor, resulting in vacuumed paintings that can be considered sculptures, meticulously treated inside and out.

The awareness of community, society and freedom, which became more and more pronounced during the corona period, permeates Berta’s creativity. Her art serves as a channel to raise awareness and rationalize these key social domains. By creating an airless space, Bertie separates her art from the influence of the external environment, allowing it to exist independently and retain its authenticity. This approach allows her to explore the depths of artistic expression, cultivating a safe haven where the figures are situated in an abstract space that resonates with the shared experiences of individuals during the pandemic. This multidimensional treatment adds complexity to her creations, blurring the distinction between the two artistic mediums.

Bearing in mind both the philosophical and symbolic meanings of the term vacuum, Berti’s work is imbued with a special spiritual perspective.

Her art delves into the intangible aspects of existence, touching the fine fibers of individual experiences of emptiness and nothingness, and the boundaries we set to protect ourselves from the consequences of relationships and transience.

The exhibited works are an invitation to introspection and contemplation.

Brajan Vojinović