Artist Spotlight – Mario Sughi

Mario Sughi is an Italian artist and illustrator living and working in Dublin. He is a member of  the IGI (Illustrators Guild of Ireland) and AI (Associazione Illustratori Italiani) and the author of nerosunero.  In Rome, at the end of the seventies, he worked as humorist in Italian satirical magazines Il Male and  Zut. He moved to Dublin in the late eighties where he studied Medieval History and in 1995 he was awarded a PhD by Trinity College Dublin. His work, satirical in humour and minimalist in style has been published and presented in international exhibition catalogues.

I believe that the work of an artist betrays his desire to make use of imagination to recreate the world in which we all live. I also believe that without a vision and the urgency to express it there is no great art.
Now it seems to me that my works hint at a desire to recreate a world where everything, every person as well as every situation, could perfectly fall in the realm either of reality or unreality. How to achieve a sort of pleasant harmony out of this dualism is one of the greatest challenge of my work. No need to say that in the field of visual art the main concerns are about colour, space, proportion, volume etc., but a good amount of irony and intellectual considerations need also to be taken on account.
Not surprisingly once the works are finished it is difficult even for me to penetrate them or to explain their exact meaning. To be honest I am always happy with the result of my work when a new sense of mystery has managed to displace all the previous certainty.