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LOGAN T. SIBREL - MENTAL SUBURBS

Logan T. Sibrel: It is useless to paint where it is possible to describe

 

Essay by Maria Vittoria Pinotti

Everything begins with a series of exterior views by the pool or towards windows, interiors in mirrors, book covers, mailboxes, still life made of photographs, charcoal sticks, cigarettes, and shell vulvas. Sibrel’s beginning is not a structured one, aiming to orderly depict an absolute place, but rather a study carried out with clear and varied amazement about the real. It is a clear and brief commentary on everyday life, allowing us to learn about some of the artist’s habits, alongside objects that, through their shape and use, have most struck him. However, what is painted has no mimetic value; it does not seek to reproduce the physical appearance of things, but rather aims to bring out their object-like character, to extract their cold and radical truth: a real dimension, strongly solid, that inevitably transforms even human subjects into objects.

Fabian Still-Life, 2024.

Oil on canvas.

Cm 40×50

SF Window, 2024.

Oil on canvas.

Cm 20×23

This interpretation is supported by the title of the exhibition Mental Suburbs, taken from a line of a poem by C.P. Cavafy, almost alluding to an intermediate place between the city and the rural environment. In fact, having lived in the city for more than fifteen years, the artist would have liked to reside in these ‘in-between’ places to experience conditions where thought and vision are both different and yet coincident at certain points. It is precisely within this sense of indeterminacy that Sibrel remains deeply rooted and courageously asks how one can reconcile the vision of a pictorial sentiment that marks and closes the more objectual knowledge of reality within a cold and algebraic geometry. So much so that it is the sharp tonal transitions and geometric shapes, the blues, flesh pinks, and ivory whites, that reveal the entire structure of the image. This last aspect allows him to render forms as though they were shaped by a paper cutter, where even in the more curvilinear parts, there remains the sensation of a solid in the process of rotation.

Swimming Hole, 2024
Oil on canvas. 12×16 inches / 30×40 cm

Pomegranate, 2024
Oil on canvas. 

30×23 cm

Rollins Still-Life, 2024
Oil and pumice on canvas

35×28 cm

Lo Specchio, 2024
Oil on canvas

30×23 cm

Send Me His Love

2024
Oil on canvas

35×28 cm

This process raises an inevitable question: for Sibrel, does the coldness of vision and coloration correspond to a particular visual sensitivity? The answer lies not so much in observation, but in the attention given to extracting the most primitive form of things, from which an instinctive pictorial purity emerges. Therefore, it is natural to refer to the formulation of Purism in the 1920s, when Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret theorized how necessary it was to treat painting as an extreme synthesis of reality – a geometrically organized phenomenon, orderly, exuding cleanliness and compositional clarity, which could metaphorically be described as a visual tendency towards crystal.

Nio, 2024
Oil on canvas

40×30 cm

Success and Failure Still-Life II, 2024
Oil on canvas panel

35×28 cm

Tush, 2024
Oil on canvas

15×15 cm

Therefore, Sibrel’s works appear as free interpretations based on a detachment from the subject, almost like open windows onto vast landscapes. Yet, what emerges is always a cautious visual approach, from which close-up views are born. These choices aim to nourish a study of ordinary facts, as we can understand from the positioning of the figures from behind, where no one is truly the protagonist except in specific postures, and from the details that are far from imaginative but documentary, typical of formal research that is free and left to chance. In this way, the works on display become forms of a crystal-like riddle hence, for Sibrel the statement it is useless to paint where it is possible to describe is fully valid. It is precisely this formulation that touches the essential point of his research, because by abandoning anecdotal, descriptive, and symbolic painting, the artist manages to reach a purity that examines and constructs scenes like pieces of a collage, following his own rules and recreating a specific order.

Sibrel works painting with a mobile process hence, through connections and references, he multiplies the layers of interpretation of a single image, offering us something autonomous and ambiguous in its many meanings. In this perspective, he has an ability: to astonish the ordinary and inform it with just a few hints, not out of voluntary neglect, but in order to provoke an expectation of inventiveness. This way, he focuses on common elements of everyday life, whose freedom of interpretation remains certain in the clarity of a crystallized, cold, condensed, and distant representation. Thus, with Sibrel, painting becomes a particular form of sculpture, in which sturdiness is conveyed through the juxtaposition of tones, whose chiaroscuro, aiming to highlight the volume and meaning of the forms, is absorbed, then desiccated.

And the strong relationship of tonal contrasts, arranged on fractured lines, sharp angles, and diverging compasses, verifies and condenses the physicality of the forms. It is precisely in this calibrated alternation and in the descriptive uncertainty of what is depicted that his paintings can be considered strongly ambivalent. I imagine that for Sibrel, the choice of what to depict is an act that occurred at a certain moment when, paradoxically, he felt nothing – absolutely nothing – and this emotional paralysis allowed him to dream and think, until he chose that one image to paint.

For this reason, one can speak of pictorial coldness, a scientific logic based on the construction of the image, in which the intersections of planes emphasise the disjointed, as if to assert the given nature and greater complexity of reality itself. What emerges is an autonomous geometry, a linear act to interpret things as a living portion in space. Sibrel does not draw inspiration from specific methods, but instead limits himself to determining which tools are useful to construct his pure images, in a visual and tactile combination, never descriptively so as to necessitate painting.

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