“I work because I believe that today’s existence goes deeper than the ideas we have of it”.
AT: Where are you from and how/why you start engaging to art?
GS: I was born in Biella, a Piedmontese town near the mountains. During the university and my philosophical studies, I began to look for an expressive language that could concretize my reflections on existence so I started to experiment at that time.
AT: When did it become serious?
GS: It was serious immediately. I think anyone who starts looking for meaning in this life is doing something important.
AT: Are there any person that have been significant in your progression as an artist?
GS: Yes, my wife, my mother and Kant.
AT: What’s your first approach to the work? Where does your process start?
GS: I reflect on the contradictions between human history and nature, then, failing to contain the doubts, I try to canalize the energy which fills me, conveying it into a meaningful experience.
“Congiunto”
AT: What are your favourite tools and materials for working?
GS: I have no preferences. I listen to the vibration of what I observe and when I find a feeling between my condition and its, I study its expressive value bringing it beyond what is officially established.
AT: Do you leave your work open to interpretation? Or do you think the viewer should engage with your work in a specific way?
GS: I don’t believe in interpretation. I think it belongs to a form of primitive and anthropocentric knowledge. If you open yourself to existence, you absorb the meaning regardless of what you think of it, and often you don’t know but it has changed your life.
AT: How do you feel while you are working? You think of the final result?
GS: I feel like a child who makes a hole on the beach and finds the water.
AT: How do you understand when a work is finished?
GS: I do not like finiteness, due to the fact that my work is all precarious, all sketched between intention and manifestation. When I see it ‘too’ finished I can’t feel anything and I destroy it so as to work on something more intense.
“Fondamenta”
“Suspension”
AT: Where does the inspiration for the work come from? Do you find inspiration outside or it’s all inside you?
GS: I’ve never had inspiration and I do not think it belongs anymore to our age. I work because I believe that today’s existence goes deeper than the ideas we have of it.
AT: Do you think art can be learned or it is something innate?
GS: In my view is important to be aware of what you want to elaborate and ignoring what reduces us such as automatons. The concept of innate is a stratagem to explain what we can not see as natural for our species.
AT: There are any artists that influenced your works? Why?
GS: Giorgio Morandi because he was able to make me feel the immensity of nothing by not representing it.
AT: How important is for you the role of social media?
GS: I guess that they will lead to the possibility of sensing the artistic force going beyond a official status. They will influence collecting and the access to an expressive way over aesthetic paradigms. From my point of view it is an important and very tangible reality.
“Puff Puff”
“Sturotype”
AT: What’s your opinion about the contemporary art system nowadays from your point of view as an artist?
GS: I think that the art system as a speculative bubble confined within the rules of identification is slowly fading and giving way to a possibility to choose independently what has value and what does not have it on the basis of autonomous and personal principles. And this will go hand in hand with the evolution of art itself towards merging with reality, granting the right to choose based on a profound and personal reflection. Dividing art from life itself has been an error that has only led to the validation of the distances between the two dimensions.
AT: What do you find to be the most challenging or daunting thing about pursuing art? What is the most rewarding part of working as an artist?
GS: Nowadays I find that what previously discouraged me now strengthens me. Therefore I feel that whatever happens I will try to work for what interests me.
AT: What are your goals and expectations for the future?
GS: Finding the way to make art with those who will view it, involving into the work who have not conceived it.
“Progressione”
Scerbo (1984) is an Italian artist currently living and working in Biella, Italy. He initially worked on drawing and painting, then he started experimenting on abstract sculpture and, in the last few years, he have dedicated him self to installation and video, finding in these last two expressive means a good research stability.
