Courteous Wrecker

Text by Prof. Pasquale Lettieri, Art Critic, Academy of Fine Arts of Naples

In order to understand the performative, sublime and sensorial dimension of Simon Berger's works, the question of how to see arises – a knowledge that must be scrupulously applied to the roundup of works on show in Sansepolcro. It is with this awareness that his expressive, beautiful and strong incursion - less metaphysical and more physical - must be approached. His is a gesture capable of remaking the rules of figuration, but also of chromatically sanctioning every smear of the imaginary, which to the artist appears as a great shattered mirror: Impossible to recompose for the choice of one fragment rather than another.

Real spatiality reflected in conceptual spatiality, held in an embrace that is the visibly felt phenomenon of an imaginary confrontation from which a silence of fullness seems to emerge. A silence of fullness reverberating with a musicality of rupture each one composes and recomposes in their own head as an inner monologue while the visible transits into the invisible. Signs and matter, an interminable game of attraction and repulsion, impregnated in metamorphic works with a plastic sensuality, which is not excluded at all from Berger's art. On the contrary, it is reaffirmed as peculiarity, as essentiality and as its own nomenclature.

Berger‘s concept of the artwork belongs to a cultural elaboration that conceives of artistic creation as a phenomenon capable of encompassing both the material and immaterial aspects in a reality that does not refer to beauty as measure and rhythm, but to sublimity as trespassing into the infinite. The work of art is posited in relation to time which is irremediable, catastrophic, as far as it is not perceptible and supremely invisible, and to space, which begins at any point and ends nowhere. Unorthodox geometries, controlled by mere hammer blows, an open chapter of a story whose rhythms come from a continuous weaving which transmits in its destruction all that it has gathered from a molecular gesturality. Seemingly a dense and connected fabric, to the point of being a thing in itself, labyrinthine tangles suggest a realm where every rationalism, every absolutism risks being inexorably lost. Without a contamination with the valences of viscerality, of olfactivity, the rhizome appears as an attractive enhancement, which acts as entrance into the magical cavern of ourselves.

In Berger, the abstract languages of the past and of memory intersect, yet driven relentlessly towards originality as befits this historical era of complexity and crisis, where one is no longer sure of anything except the need to research. A research spurred by a continuous erraticity of forms and ways of being that no longer has, fortunately, the certainties of futurisms, cubisms, and dadaisms, but is aware of the need to continue the dream of creativity, in which we all recognise ourselves, as in a mirror, even at the cost of having to shatter it.

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Prof. Pasquale Lettieri is an Italian art critic and scholar based in Naples. He teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, where he engages with contemporary artistic research and critical theory. Through his writing and academic work, he contributes to discourse surrounding contemporary art and its cultural and philosophical dimensions.