Page 23 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

texture in a way distracted from the perception of the Gestalt. The same was true of colour, which the orthodox minimalists considered a subversive and deactivating element capable of altering the perception of form.
GM Concepts like form and frontality seem essential in your work. Do you think that all the neatness, elegance and sharpness we perceive in your work also has another side? And what would happen if this never goes beyond the surface and, at best, is just speculation?
FS Nothing can be done if what we do is not perceived in the end. In a way,
we should accept as a possibility that the work we produce may remain concealed and may even become invisible. Even so, I make an effort to specify my thoughts formally, to clarify, formalise and discern them, but sometimes the result is not too kind to the spectator. I don’t make things too easy, as I require of the viewer a conformation and interest that often doesn’t happen, and I must admit that perhaps because of this I like to retain a certain hermetic quality in my work. I am therefore aware of the risk that some of
my works may not be seen and therefore end up being “emptied”, becoming intelligible. I believe that deep down I try not to make things too explicit, literal and easy; I feel culturally European and it seems to me that ultimately I belong to poetics that do not reveal themselves too much at first sight. The work
has to put up a certain amount of resistance to the spectator. It is rather like what happens in the dialectic between matter and anti-matter, where the most difficult effort that the physics of particles has to make is to succeed in seeing the invisible symmetry that everything we see possesses, so that in the end we have the sensation that, from the visible, we are never going to manage to grant the status of reality to everything that cannot be observed.
GM What value do the materials have in the work? Are you interested in their transformation?
FS Since my beginnings I have progressively approached reality from my hands, and it is they that have finally forced the eye to disclose my actions. Painting came after my innate tendency to make things, a custom that imbued my work with a certain amount of irrationality. It was an attitude which might be understood as anti-intellectual today and in a certain sense as something craft-oriented and archaic, as it does not spring from previ- ous ideas but rather, on the contrary, it seeks them in my actions and finds them in their results. I took a long time to understand this, but in the end
my artistic activity is a way of exploring the meaning of everything I do. Art has become what it is. A means of knowledge in itself, something that is not
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