Sudas’ journey in art – with a selection of his most recent work
It is not easy to talk about a painter, because his evolution can be non-linear, inconsistent, paradoxical. It can happen that the periods of inactivity are the most fertile and that there are no periods more apparently conducive to the maturation of a talent than others. S. for example, spent most of his life wanting to paint, but only late in life, very late, did he allow himself to be a painter. Here we recount the crucial steps of this evolution…
It was the coldest and most deserted train he had ever been on, and from Turin he still had to get to Paris. He felt as if he had a bit of a fever but perhaps it was the excitement of the task ahead of him. He had never taken such a long journey before on his own; he expected everything but nothing happened, just this bitter cold and a deserted landscape that partly disturbed him, partly excited him.
S. had set out to meet Alberto Giacometti in his studio, in Rue Hippolyte-Maindron, Paris.
He was sixteen years old; it was not clear to him whether he wanted to be a sculptor or a painter, and he did not know where to start. Certainly the trip to Paris did not give him much of a beginning, since once he had arrived in front of the famous sculptor’s studio, he became paralysed by a wave of shyness, turned on his heel and went back to his hotel. In Paris, however, he bumped into Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, which kept him riveted for hours. Miller was an erotic mystic and loved art, about which he lovingly wrote in To Paint Is To Love Again.
S. was born in ’43 and his father died in a Soviet prison camp a month after his birth. The bombs, his mother’s waiting, the horrors that still contaminated the air, so many things contributed to the foundation of a not-exactly-well-balanced being who, even as a teenager, gave bizarre expressions of himself by painting large herds of horses on large sheets of paper. Hundreds of horses without hooves. They had been drawn so quickly. They seemed to fly. Later he would say they had no grounding. It was, of course, S. who had no grounding.
Then, for his fourteenth birthday, someone gave him a magnificent wooden box of oil paints.
He was the guest of relatives who owned a property in the countryside where there was lots of steep terrain on which peasants worked laboriously. On a scorching sunny day he decides to try out his gift, and around noon goes to a nice, not-too-steeply-sloping meadow, sets up his easel, puts a not-too-small canvas on it and prepares to create his first oil painting. He looks at the landscape for a long time, the fields marbled with greens and yellows, the forest, the blue sky moved upon by mounds of wandering clouds. He is so intent on painting that he pays no attention to the passing of time.
A peasant approaches, looks at the very dark painting on the easel and reads the title: People at Night. S. had painted a seascape at night, with the sea, a pier, a lot of people standing around illuminated by the moon, and a few street lamps giving off the dim light of zinc white mixed with ultramarine blue. Yet it was noon on a summer’s day!
The painting was not much, but it can be considered the forerunner, the prodrome, an early symptom of a life of painting. Another example: One day, much later, he invited a friend to pose for him. He worked for several hours and the model started to become very curious. Finally, after the artwork was finished, she asked to see it. She was transfixed and angry. S. had drawn himself in the act of drawing, and there was not the slightest sign of a model.
In addition to Giacometti, S. greatly appreciated Francis Bacon, whom he admired for his ability to embed the disorder of certain forms into the strict, geometric order of others. He also liked the cruelty and rawness he perceived in his works, and that Bacon had said something to the effect of “The world is cruel, not me.” Then, as he grew older, he would update his judgement… preferring less emotional paintings.
Speaking of Bacon. And here we are talking about an adult S. Dazed by overwhelming sentimental affairs, and in order to change the air, he travels to London and settles in a hotel in Kensington with the serious intention of learning English. He will, he thinks, earn a living doing odd jobs. He ends up loitering around town and often happens to pass by Francis Bacon’s home, not far from his hotel. The urge to enter is strong but shyness is stronger, and so he takes refuge in the damp greenhouses of Kew Gardens.
Maybe because since he had arrived in London he has stopped taking certain psychotropic drugs, or maybe because he is a visionary, while walking in the greenhouses he has the impression that he hears plants talk to each other and to him. It becomes a kind of obsession. Plants talk and eat time. He loses track of time, as he writes to a friend.
He doesn’t touch a pencil but attends a Rolling Stones concert and visits a Pop Art exhibition, which impresses him greatly. According to S., but not only to him, we think that we see things, but in fact between us and the object, even a tin can, there are all the cans, the things we have seen before in life. If someone shows us an everyday object as if for the first time, as if it were extraordinary, this someone offers us a spiritual experience. Even with a urinal.
S. had friends who were versed in a conceptual vision of art; he knew some ‘poverists’, and he himself had often felt the temptation to ‘perform’, or even to stop painting, as the only expressive possibility. He had bought some entomologist’s boxes, the kind with glass, and put little bones in them, skeletons of small animals, but integrated them in a graphic text written in pencil or pen so as to create some semantic confusion. But that wasn’t what he wanted, he was always ‘thinking’ about painting. He thought about it, quite literally, because in reality he could not paint for many years. He was totally blocked. Or rather, whatever he did was extremely ephemeral, volatile. He couldn’t keep up, he was in a hurry. He seemed to have nothing left inside or outside.
Then, suddenly, came envy. He began to envy some painters. He envied their prolificacy, their energy, their freedom. He felt barren and the only thing he could offer himself was… light. He bought himself a miner’s lamp, stuck it on his head, sat in front of a vertical sheet and drew in the circle of light projected on the sheet.
Of the few certainties he had, the one that now emerged was that he was a lineist, rather than a colourist. He liked the line, how it twisted in space, its humanity, and it was gratifying, in the course of that luminous liturgy, to follow its whims, its collision with others, to seek out the least obvious paths. To brush up against the hint of a figure and retreat. He felt that what little painting he practised had something to do with the Informal, particularly with the painter Wols whose aphorism ‘Seeing means closing your eyes’ was very dear to him.
One day, in his early thirties, he took all the paint he had in his brain and went to India to meet a spiritual Master who lived in an Ashram in a town called Pune. And here begins a story of several years in which, apart from the sculpture of a tiger, art is put aside. His gaze is completely absorbed in working on himself. We could call this chapter of his life ‘A Second Birth’. Then, after being psychologically shaken for seven years in the commune of Pune and the commune of Miasto, Italy, S. returns to his normal life.
Very occasionally he approaches aniconic painting, i.e. without the shadow of a figure, but this does not satisfy him.
Every now and then he would get together with some friends in Milan to talk about art, even about the art that was stirring and lingering in his head. His friends were all psychotherapists, so it was not uncommon for their words to reach him and leave their mark. “In your drawings we can’t see a figure because it probably scares you.” This hit him hard, and he returned home and set to work.
Meditation had tightened the expression “looking inwards” and as he wandered around with his pencil he happened to find a figure form within himself. It was as if he were drawing his body from within. It was his body that walked on the paper, that bent over, knelt, died, ran, met other bodies, inhabited natural or artificial environments, lived. Imagination took shape, his body.
S., with a little exaggeration, likened this discovery to that of Dr Chauvet who, following a breath of fresh air from the ground in a French karst area, moved stones and dug until he found a rich deposit of prehistoric wall art. For S. it was the beginning of an excavation that continues to this day. He discovered that at any time he could give form to a figure that embodied a constant, unrelenting desire for expression, even if it carried with it the stigma of unbridgeable absence; as if drawing a figure would feed and starve it at the same time.
An uninterrupted production began. Hundreds of figures that, unlike the horses he had drawn as a young man, stood well, had grounding. At a certain point, he had three volumes made, bound with two hundred blank pages each, and began to draw with the tip of his pen. In three years he filled them to the very last page.
It was not clear to him whether he was hungry for figures or the figures were hungry for him….
One day he decided to experiment with animation and enrolled in a course run by a true master of the craft. After a few months he felt ready and invented a story. He drew over five hundred sheets and out came a ten-minute video which was quite fascinating, he had to admit, but once more he realised that he was destined for the non-animated figure, and began a relentless production of sheets using water-based colours, because in fact he could not stand the smell of oil paint.
He worked several hours a day and within four years had produced more than seven hundred plates; slowly the figure dissolved, dismembered, disfigured. He was aware that he was fabricating a language, and that to do so he had to be willing to overcome certain habits, to betray himself in some way. He strongly believed that this was every true painter’s task and that the figure would guide him in this task.
The language involved the use of colours that were unfamiliar to him: pink, Naples yellow, sky blue, orange red, Van Dyke brown and black transformed into a rich array of greys. He had radically changed his attitude towards colour and was experimenting, searching, staying on a piece for a long time, like an alchemist. He no longer used colour hastily, ready to move on to something else.
To stay with the object of his desire gave him a sense of fullness and satiety. True, every now and then he had the feeling of being totally anachronistic and looked at his brushes as if they were unbearably antiquated tools. However, all it took was very little, a piece of good paper, good colours and brushes, a little insomnia and painting at four o’clock in the morning (he could have bet he was the only one awake in town) became an experience he could not do without. The fact that it could be anachronistic embellished it, and vitalised the hand-to-hand combat that took place between painter and painting each time.
He could now say that he felt himself to be a painter; he probably also had a style, which is created in spite of ourselves, but above all he perceived a desire to engage daily, to perpetuate a quest that compensates for the many years of inactivity. Sometimes he liked to think he was building an avatar that gained substance through his dedication.
Translated by Punya with edits by Madhuri, based on the Italian version edited by OTI (November 2023)
Related articles
- Giving life to a tiger – Sudas gives us a magical little tale from Pune (August 2022)
- My urge to draw the human form – New artwork by Sudas (February 2024)
- A ‘page’ painter – A first selection from Sudas’ artwork (August 2023)
- More stories by Sudas on Osho News
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