Lined: the Surface Awakes

By Elisabetta Longari

Sartorio’s painting seems to be, and in fact is, abstract, that is a concrete experience that brings the surface of a picture, after a series of modifications, to a formal and chromatic arrangement. The canvas, once Sartorio has painted it, far from being any kind orthodox gestalt exercise works for the ‘eye and the spirit’ of the viewer as a body of mainly perceptive facts and stimuli. And it also, at the start, presents itself as an articulated system of enigmas.



Each work acts as a demonstration that all the sighted see but that not all know what they see and how they see it. Above all it is impossible to see seeing.

In each picture by him (though perhaps it would be better to speak of each visual text) the artist suggests to the viewer a excursion ranging from the physiology to the philosophy of vision and clarifies the terms of its interior contradictions. Let’s see in what way.

It is only by a kind of field research - one without foregone conclusions and proceeding step by step from a series of considerations and actions united to perception, one of temporary answers to the question ‘how is our visual image made?’ – that Sartorio’s painting arrives at its organisation into various 'figures' (where by figure we obviously are not referring to the iconography of the human body: what is immediately apparent when we look at these surfaces is the dominance of the line).



His pictures are enlivened by the rhythms of his chromatic grid, inasmuch as the only element of the picture is its very structure. There is no waste or distractions: the colour is directly formative, there is no space for the traditional split between form and colour, between line and colour, between outline and colour. More than a correspondence there is coincidence: ‘Insofar as one paints, one draws’ Cézanne stated.

A tireless searcher after optical phenomena and an inquirer into laws with the aim of testing them, questioning them, and subtly undermining them using their own margins of ambiguity, Sartorio continually challenges the concept of balance. He plays on the boundaries, he is poised on a knife edge and creates strong but new and unnerving structural units, he ‘tries out’ possible relationships between the various forces in play. In order to do this in a radical and efficient way he has chosen in this phase – as happened for Mondrian, if we want to search for his genealogical roots – to reduce the organisation of his surface to a distribution of orthogonal lines but, differently from the Dutch master, he does not mortify colour by limiting it to the primaries, on the contrary he distils the most unusual and slightly poisonous hues and uses unsettling tones that would bring joy to a Mannerist’s heart. As his titles indicate these are mostly Colori crudeli, cruel colours that – rarely accomplices and, if they are, then they are only in an occult way – create difficult and basically turbulent relationships between themselves. The gradations, living and subtly sensual, and the temperature of the colours, difficult and frequently introverted or, on the other hand, brazen in their sharpness or bluntness, become even more disturbing as a result of their daring and risky juxtapositions, taken to the very limits of unpleasantness. But then, when we look closer and longer, the risks run by our eyes are transformed into a new and unusual experience of pleasure, a pleasure similar to that of some physical exercise which forces us to move muscles we didn’t even know existed, and which intensifies the sensation of being alive by this new awareness.



Colours have a physical and psychological weight. First of all they are a real and material force even though they might also have an important symbolic meaning. In fact, as a result of one of their primary and primordial characteristics valid in all cultures, even if in different ways, they seem to be in contact with certain energy fields. They stimulate associations, produce psychic effects, evoke experiences and express moods. As Goethe wrote, ‘… Experience teaches us that each individual colour produces a particular mood. It has been said of witty Frenchman that il prétendoit que son ton de conversation avec Madame étoit changé depuis qu’elle avoit changé en cremoisi le meuble de son cabinet qui était bleu’. What makes us laugh in life, because we take it for a witticism, is true in painting: in Sartorio’s paintings even the slightest change influences the rest of the surface.

Even if it is the basis of our chromatic experiences of nature that sparks off the emotional principles of a colour, in Sartorio’s painting colours take on a strongly ambiguous character: they are, at one and the same time, ‘thing-like’, urban, industrial, artificial and ‘atmospheric’ (4). They assume sophisticated connotations, they are neither eloquent nor explainable. For example, a certain kind of lilac, deeply ambivalent as a result of its derivation from two ‘opposed’ colours, red and blue, seems on the one hand, as a result of its almost ‘metallic’ effect, to come straight from a pot of industrial paint without any intervention on the part of the artist and, on the other, to be part of the rich, cultured and ‘noble’ chromatic tradition of art history, something that constitutes a kind of ‘second degree’ nature. In fact, that lilac contains, in its very body, the memory and emotion of the use that has been made of it by other artists – in this case I am, above all, reminded of Monet’s water lilies, while Sartorio’s yellows remind me of Crivelli, the pearly whites and greys recall Savoldo, the blues and pinks seem to come from Pontormo, the sulphurous greens from Grunewald and Bronzino, while the relationship between that orange and anthracite lead me to Bacon … and so on and so forth…



Active, impure, preferably untrustworthy colours, more or less ‘disturbed’ below the surface, not docile nor even immediately attractive; each in its own way is disturbing and creates strange overtones.

The colours of Kill Bill are ‘technological”, the highly artificial ones of Technicolor cinema, of the digital virtual universe, right on the very edge of kitsch, and we see above all that subtly repellent orange, dull and decidedly diseased.

(It seems that we must speak of colours either in a scientific and stifling way or else poetically and approximately.)

The colour settles into determined structures, and I will not talk about forms except to say that the relationship so intimately linking form and colour ensures that they become a single body within the dynamic unity of the line. The use and combinations of the lines allow an empirical and plural colour structure with a high generative power, genuine ‘armatures’ that act as pictorial machines dynamically activating the two dimensional space of the surfaces. In the work of Sartorio we can see ‘between the lines’ a rich and mainly Western - but not only - visual culture. For example, Mandala, besides the iconographical hints given by the title, seems to suggest a relationship with the chromatic and spatial painting of Raphael’s Transfiguration.

For some time now for Sartorio the line has become his preferred ‘figure’. He certainly prefers it for the richness and complexity of its visual function and he must have chosen it because it is the index of the continuity of becoming, the mark of an irresistible flow, the essence and axis of movement, the directional vector, and thus action (and not form).

On the other hand what at times might seem to be a rectangle is nothing other that an interrupted and fattened-up lined. “Line is not a form ... it is a structure”.

The line also seems to act as an indicator of sound and intensifies its intensity, frequency and duration.

The line is never neutral but is provoking, sharp, straight, volatile, showy, attractive, sonorous, overpowering, loud, implacable, irreducible, noisy, speedy, special, emblematic, eccentric, exclusive. It acts as a guide, it pushes and fractures, it is unbeatable and wild, revolutionary, it creates discontinuity and scandal. It is underscored, audacious, uneasy, problematical, offensive, suspect, traditionally malign, even diabolic and anyway dangerous. The line marks and signals, it discriminates, introduces differences; it is difference, it is what is left over. It is ambiguous and irresistible, it tightens and loosens space, it states and denies, is underlines and blocks.

The line is difference, excess, exception, subversion. The line constructs, runs ahead, it is fast, it slips, shakes and escapes; it changes, destabilises, confounds, distorts, interrupts, cuts short. The line alerts, alarms, mobilises, it is active and coercive, it engages the surface in a passionate ‘coming and going’. “The line not only both reveals and hides but it also creates a figure together with the background, the finite and the infinite, the part and the whole. This is why every lined surface often seems uncontrollable, almost unseizable”.

The line is the disturbing ‘figure’ par excellence, it is both an invitation and a barrier, an obvious discord.

“A line never occurs alone. In order for it to ‘function’, in order for it to gain all its meaning, it must be either associated or opposed to other surface structures... “. The line is never alone, at least in Sartorio’s painting, but spreads and tends to multiplication. Rhythm. Here each line is contained, kept at a distance and bordered by another. Which one was painted before or after? You need some time before you can decide.

The surface of the blank canvas is shaken from its white and immaculate torpor in order to start moving and be stretched as in some system of elasticity and make room for itself in some differently articulated space in a complex system of mutual agreements.

The seduction and sedition of lines.

It is as a result of the difficult matter of focussing on the dialogue between lines which, above all in the last creative phase, undergoes a series of subtle tonal variations, and forms the overall layout of the picture, one made up of perceptively geometrically constructed grids which, though they are extremely marked, are difficult to decode at first sight: is there a figure/background relationship? What is in the foreground?

And so we experience the limits of our ability to decode and recognise just how much is in front of our eyes.

The picture is the final result of the combined action of chromatic forces, formed along orthogonal axes, and conveniently altered as regards their values; a space that diminishes the value of the singularity of the centre and the boundaries imposed by the edges by replacing the hierarchy by co-ordinating the various local centres. Sartorio’s surfaces, which are like floating barges or flying carpets, are organised, as Arnheim has written, following “a grid of eccentric vectors that move vertically and horizontally without any kind of anchor”, and emanate an almost hypnotic power, in particular when attention is fixed on the meeting and crossing points of lines where pulsating ganglia are formed which seem both to affirm and also to deny their own weight. The superimposition of lines leads to partial cancellations and interruptions that create doubts about the uniformity of the lines themselves for they seem to have a different coloration as they proceed. It is difficult to say if this effect is due to the reverberation and influence of the nearby colours or if the painter actually has mixed his paint and enjoyed himself by imperceptibly varying its nature. Actually, with Sartorio both options are true.

His hand is not guided by theory. His structures are never established in advance nor are they a result of preparatory studies or of abstract intentions on the part of the artist: the picture is an organism that grows under the hands of the painter as a result of the constant and reciprocal ‘relating’ of the colour sequences over the surface which are temporarily halted by a series of relationships only then to arrive at their final and definitive rhythmical outcome. It is the eye that decides if the final painting works overall and if at that particular point another intervention might ruin its balance or take it elsewhere.

In the space of Sartorio’s pictures even the time factor has its precise role: perception, as it deals with the chromatic structures that lead to productive uncertainties of the eye and act as simultaneous, dissonant, and even contradictory stimuli, needs a certain amount of time to settle down and understand (not to understand logically, but to understand at a visual level) the painterly act it has been asked to witness.

To look at Sartorio’s paintings means being implicated in a strange experience, being obliged to test the very complexity of the perceptive act and to become aware of the fact that this asks for time. This proposal is dangerous, even more so when seen in the context of the congenital haste of our times.

Borderline is a polyptych composed of four elements that act as the visual proof of what is hinted at by the title, which, what is more, can also be pushed further to define the whole of Sartorio’s work without fears of losing sight of its most intimate meaning: his painting loves to dare, to step right on the edge of the abyss of the impossible, to risk attacks of vertigo.

Each picture is a portion of space that takes part in the infinite impetus of the lines. Rhythm. Each painting is a kind of close-up that underlines a certain visual behaviour which acts in ‘another’ way with respect to what was previously brought to our attention. Doppio gioco, a diptych of two square canvases, highlights the tough game of the reciprocal relationship between the exception and the rule, and is the best demonstration of the fact that Sartorio’s work is above all based on residue, on what is left over.

The square format with its tendency to ‘centrality’ as a result of the equality of the sides of its axes, is often used by the artist, perhaps because it is a highly enjoyable challenge. But as regards the format it should be pointed out that, just as so far Sartorio has not used lines that were not straight, so he has never used a tondo or even an oval format while, besides the previously mentioned square, he loves the rectangle whether extended vertically or horizontally.

Each of his paintings is temporarily resolved in this particular way or, in other words, each picture is the sum of the behaviour of the coloured lines of the surface, the testament of the simultaneous action of decisions made from time to time from the vast possibilities afforded by the canvas to the next intervention to be made. In other words, it is a demonstration of the procedural value of his painting.

He maintains the anti-illusionist and metonymic character of abstract (and decorative) painting: the paintings are potentially infinite portions of relative space.

All Sartorio’s painting is the result of a kind of challenge that, by extension, acquires even an ethical and political dimension. This challenge consists mainly in involving and ‘rhyming’ a series of elements that can only with difficulty interact and create a dialogue and, by way of a progressive series of changes, finally arrive at a risky and, just as a result of this, precious agreement with the forces in play.

The painting of Sartorio is in the main the reality of painting, the voice of visual intentions and the incarnation of those perceptive facts decisive at each step; but it also acts as a metaphor for the human existence, one consisting of difficult relationships marked by complex and often antagonistic tensions the equilibrium of which, never hazarded but always new, is at times to be searched for only with difficulty and fatigue.

This painting is a kind of reminder of the importance and the inevitability of doubt as a methodological factor, a clear invitation not to take anything for granted, and to make a close analysis of the components of the experiences we are presented with.

We can quite fairly say that Sartorio is a modern painter among post-modernists because he still believes that painting can act as a model for reality and suggest itself as a possible example. What we can find in it is mainly a lesson in pluralism: his is a language, not just proud of relating and respecting diversity, but actually completely basing itself on it and forming itself by moving from the contrary forces in play. It shows us the fruitfulness of doubt and the richness of difference.