Siro Cugusi’s Secret Garden

Images courtesy of the artist and Galleri Kant
Text by Claire Milbrath

 Siro Cugusi’s Secret Garden showcases the painter’s trademark high-gloss, scribbly, mechanical masterpieces. Secret Garden is a funny exhibition title, said to evoke a meditative place of introspection and innocent pleasure, when in reality the works exhibited bring to mind medieval surgery, crude apparatuses, and sordid Guston flesh-tones. Cugusi’s paintings look like mathematical outlines created by a pre-science mind. The painter is interested in presenting figures not as clear images, but as they would appear in memories—veiled, and incomplete. His mixture of materials (oil paint, enamel, spray paint, wax pastels to name a few) and successive layering create a feeling of imbalance and chaos. Perhaps it is easier to attribute Cugusi’s Secret Garden not to the realm of natural beauty and innocence, but to Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, a mythical place of biomorphic, mysterious forms. See the Sardinian painter’s works at Galleri Kant in Copenhagen until April 15th.