Basel SBB Painting

Architecture filled with humanity raises from Andrea Sbra Perego’s painting, where the recurring theme is the city that lives and pulses together with the inevitable human factor. Squares, urban glimpses or railway stations are, from time to time, animated by a crowd with undefined contours, in constant motion. Nervous brushstrokes, like vectorial forces provided with different directions , mixed in dropping and graphics, vibrate with one voice with the sky, a mobile blue full of accents, with the never quiet fronts of the buildings, in perfect harmony with the unstoppable human swarm. The Immediate and rapid gesture of painting, and the incisive and synthetic stretch, correspond to continuous motion filling each canvas, artist’s autobiography in pictures, a tireless globetrotter and stateless person by vocation. His artistic research focuses on imaginary spaces of an accelerated and frenetic journey, high-flux transportation infrastructures such as railway stations, airports and underground. In the above mentioned “non places” the man can be perceived in relation to the environemet like constant presence in the form of urban swarm, where the lack of individual’s identity can be felt among the indistinct mass. Images of railway stations and airport s become metaphors of transience, of the situation of transit and continuous flux, of his trip not yet concluded, sensations constants in the poetics of Sbra Perego. Every picture seems to geographically define a particular place, as well as a reference point on the time axis of memory; after closer inspection of the surface of each canvas you can find a layering of maps, cards, tickets, newspapers and memories that often have no relevance with the represented cities. In each painting the mainland, dematerializing the asphalt and the roadway to emphasize the humanity that flows through them It is always a collage of topographic maps from various sources, with soft character pastels colors, to be represented. The protagonists of each work thus become citizens of the world, the now inevitable emblem ongoing globalization and ultimately a kind of self-portrait of himself. Each metropolis is thus not so much the point of arrival or the conclusion of an itinerary but the outcome of an in progress path, where everything accumulates and mixes in a continuous sum of differences, able to shape the uniqueness of every individual. In this very personal inward journey, without a specific geographical destination, where each stop, each city still is a temporary situation that the viewer, homo viator occasional or for pleasure one can recognize himself in the same condition of the artist, homo viator by nature.