Artgenève

The work of Sarri centers on the relationship of man and machine. In his sleekly stylized canvases, Sarri collages fragmented elements—both human and mechanical—into dark, often erotic fantasies reminiscent of 1920s cinema, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). A surrealist spirit infuses these futuristic visions, which are rendered with the hard edge and bright colors of Pop Art, evoking cruel parallel worlds in which man has become subordinate to the machines they themselves created.

Sarri originally studied painting in Bern, Switzerland and then in Paris in the late 1950s, but it was his first visit to the United States in 1965 when the subject of his paintings shifted to explore the connections between humanity and technology, which have remained the dominant themes of his career. For over five decades he has continued to propose formal compositions placed between fantasy and a simultaneous analytic reality, with an iconographic symbolism evoking science and science fiction. Human intelligence mixes with the computer, and underlies a new understanding of cognitive processes reproducible by artificial systems. This imagery reveals body laboratories, specific to an era of work automation, correlated to the increased research of performances and corporal algorithms. This exhibition offers an opportunity to discover or rediscover Sergio Sarri: one of the pioneers of the dualistic figuration between humanity and machine, inscribing himself in research that extends from the sixteenth century to the present.