stage name nome d’arte Creating art can never be an innocent act; scandal is its destiny, horizon of each artwork. There cannot be a masterpiece without a scandal, a word abused as much as distorted: but in its etymology skandalon is the stumbling block, only an impediment. An interrupter. What stops you forcing to a head-on collision with your conscience, to turn on the light, to navigate routes ever imagined before - to the point that, in his last interview with Dix de Der in 1975, the last corsair Pier Paolo Pasolini claimed the sacrosanct right to scandalize for those who create, and the sublime pleasure to be scandalized for those who behold, because scandal reflects nothing but the philosophical topos of shipwreck: «When I was shipwrecked, then I sailed well³». From Erasmus to Nietzsche, from Leopardi to Pascal to Pasolini, scandal is a right and the shipwreck is sweet, if the land to land on is the Holy one of each one’s own growth. This is the story of a sweet shipwreck. Of a sailor who has been able to sanctify his own scandals, those changes of course to which art calls, so that the destination can be called ‘art'. Pietro Sedda [Cagliari, 1969, lives and works in Milan], an art degree earned in Oristano, a master’s in scenery in Brera, preserves of his origins a deep-rooted bond with the sea, that he loves from a respectful distance [«I prefer to observe it rather than to live it»], and with black, as «black is the soul in hinterland». Sea, Black. Abyss. Familiarity with the depth of water as with the depth of flesh. It is to his basics that Sedda gets back, in Oristano, to open Officina Alzheimer [1998], fecund womb of design objects called to rebirth from recycled materials, from «materials that had a memory, to create a new one». It is towards his basics that Sedda gravitates in rebaptising himself Pietrolio [2000], nom de plume which combines his name with the scandalous one of Pasolini’s unfinished masterpiece, plotting elegantly situationist guerrilla-actions within renowned art places, in Italy and abroad. Scandal: often art does not allow survival. Shipwreck: hijacking the destination, the exhibition support, from the canvas to the skin. A map of epidermal uniquenesses becoming storms to face, whales to tame on the precarious but alive surface of the body, on which Sedda as Ahab skilfully sails on unknown convexities, compared to the previous horizon of the white canvas, dynamic three-dimensionalities becoming art by means of an iconographic heritage sacred and profane, like a nocturnal palimpsest, as by means of a recognizable, firm gesture solved in a refinedly perspective way. London for three years [2003-2006] and Urbino until 2008 become ports of call to land in Milan where, in 2010, Sedda christens what is already considered one of the ten most important tattoo-parlours in the world: The Saint Mariner, pantheon of icons protecting those «hermetic men absorbed in fantastic thoughts and dreams», as Sedda defines the subjects of which he is father hybridizing languid kisses with stormy seas, lace faces with retro coiffure, digital glitches in physiognomic perimeters, epidermal wunderkammer arising from the hypnotic buzz of tattoo needles to live its sub/dermal sur/real. The sea knows no boundaries as Sedda's art doesn’t, for which new sweet shipwrecks represent new virgin lands to lap, new surfaces hosting his subjects to make iconic specimens out of them. Nine design seats that resemanticized the historic 3130 - Grand Prix by Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen [2014], whose proceeds were fully devolved to Dynamo Camp. Spines as prosceniums to project New Flesh on, as in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, in occasion of the performance Mare, Mare... for Antonio Marras [2016]. The packaging of a shaving care line [Special Barber Pack for Gum, 2015] and of a perfume [Saint Mariner for Parfumerie Id. no. NAME, SURNAME, OVERVIEW. Particulière, 2017] featuring the portraits of his ludicrous and dreamlike lyricists’ crew. Five exclusive BMW X2 Rebel Edition models [2018]. A recent collection of ceramics shortcircuiting the formal classicism of fine china with the controlled electroshock of its subjects [Cilla Marea for Rosenthal, 2019]. And The Saint Mariner, urban clothing line that, from Caronte [spring/summer 2018] to Domenica [autumn/winter 2019], diverts his iconographic heritage from the motionless support of the skin to the changeable one of the fabric. As if they were logs, three art books in limited edition for Logos and one anthological exhibition in Oristano travel through the ports of call of twenty years navigated through continents, museums and bodies grown to be his travel baggage; scandals and shipwrecks in painting, drawing, photography and video, like mementos of that Flemish iconographic tradition that Sedda loves, and therefore desecrates. An epidermal epidemic of bodies like shrouds and seascapes in faces, narrated through an unquiet and sophisticated visual grammar; black novels for lovers, noir tales written ink on skin. «Men and women and animals, extrapolated from rock-clubs and bars, and from ports and postcards of the 1920s, extrapolated from regions of the art world bordering on fashion and design places. Bodies taken from B-movies, from underground fashion photographs, from the ‘50s black and white television. Bodies made with graphic lines that create the same impact of a movie image at the drive-in glimpsed from the highway. Bodies and faces that kiss, falling bodies, faces looking elsewhere, faces gravitating. In Pietro Sedda's drawings the images do not represent the world; they create it4». With the scandalous obstinacy of those who want to accomplish, once again and then again, a shipwreck worthy of satisfying a Holy Sailor. www.pietrosedda.com www.saintmariner.com #pietrosedda 48 49 3 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Adagia, I ed. 1508: «cum naufragium feci, tunc bene navigavi». 4 FAM - Francesca Alfano Miglietti, critical text for L'Opera al Nero 1998-2018 - Pietro Sedda's anthological exhibition curated by Ivo Serafino Fenu, Pinacoteca Carlo Contini, Oristano, November 2018.
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