Maurizio Sergiusti

Lives and works in Olbia, Province of Gallura North-East Sardinia, Italy

Artist statement

My practice begins with objects that have already lived a life. Among them, discarded traffic signs have become a recurring material through which I investigate transformation, perception, and the relationship between an object's previous identity and the image it can become. I initially treated the sign as a surface: painting over it, cutting it, removing parts of its metal, and combining it with other found objects. Over time, the sign gradually moved from surface to material, and from individual object to a recurring element within larger compositions. This evolution gradually changed my role in the process. Rather than imposing an image onto each individual object, I became increasingly interested in what could happen by intervening less. Existing colors, damage, holes, shapes, and traces of use became information rather than imperfections to erase. In my most recent work, discarded traffic signs remain materially intact. Selected and positioned in relation to one another, they operate as physical pixels: autonomous objects that retain their identity while becoming part of another image. As my intervention on each individual sign becomes smaller, the scale of the work becomes larger. Across painting, sculpture, assemblage, installation and site-specific work, I am interested in this tension between what an object was and what it can become — not by concealing its history, but by allowing that history to remain visible within a new form.

Artwork