Mario Sulis
MATER MATERIA
The object, freed by the Dadaists from its intrinsic function, rethought by the Surrealists as an investigative tool of the unconscious, magical and dreamlike, revisited in the mid-twentieth century by Pop Art, American New Dada, and European Nouveau Réalisme, continues to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for art.
While Duchamp’s ready-mades aimed at visual indifference, in Meret Oppenheim’s Surrealist objet trouvé there is an emotional charge linked to unconscious mechanisms. With Nouveau Réalisme, the choice to exhibit everyday objects multiplies into increasingly varied and complex declinations and meanings; their preservation and display aim to counter the consumption mechanisms imposed by modern capitalist society.
The dialogue between artist and material becomes increasingly intimate, almost weaving existential relationships with it, as in the case of Alberto Burri, capable of assembling and suturing sacks, creating burns on plastic sheets, wood, and metals, in a constant and lyrical control of the material and its processes of consumption.
Like Alberto Burri, his main artistic reference and a doctor as well, Mario Sulis began his assemblages in the 1980s, carrying out an aesthetic requalification of leftover everyday objects through a patient work on glass scraps, marble, plastics, and iron, or by using unusual objects such as shooting range targets or obsolete items like CD-ROMs, coming from urban and industrial waste.
The abandoned object triggers in him the urge to transform it into something to which dignity can be restored through art, an ethical gesture that gains greater value in the context in which it is inserted, that of a society where the life of objects becomes increasingly short and their repair increasingly expensive.
The works of Mario Sulis result from careful planning and attention to detail that derive from the artist’s habit of monitoring every aspect of the creative process: from the reaction of the material to his gesture, to a cut or a juxtaposition, from associations with new materials to the chemical composition of the color, arriving at the finished work through a long, maternal gestation. It is in the final outcome that we see the doctor and the artist coincide, the rebirth or healing of the material.
Caterina Ghisu
