Back in April 2009 a reader of my Blogs for AbsoluteArts posted the following comment:
“On the www.albertosughi.com website there is a very powerful painting called “Ruling class”. Would love to participate in a discussion on that piece.” Since then I committed myself to holding such a discussion and today I will try to maintain that promise. Possibly in order to understand The Ruling Class (“La Classe Dirigente, Oil on Canvas, 165×140cm, 1965) we need to place and read it in the context of another group of works also painted between 1964 and 1965. So let’s start by examining the Historic Moment (L’Ora Storica), a work I painted at the end of 1964 and that clearly is a prelude to The Ruling Class itself.
This is a triptych, 165 by 420 centimetres, one of the paintings that most reflect if not the world of Bacon, at least Bacon’s style, clawing at the canvas, his very open way of painting first on unprepared canvas, with a great sweep of background colouring, that had a strong influence on me. I felt most attracted to three painters: Degas, Munch and Bacon. In fact, I then felt an affinity between them, even if secretly, not from the thematic point of view, but as a way of confronting the canvas, a great affinity between Degas and Bacon.
In fact, Bacon was influenced by Sickert, who was influenced by Degas, and had a certain way of painting nudes that could also allude to the scabrous style of Munch. A painter who has no problems with poetics, because he is sure of always being himself, does not have any difficulty in stealing from others what can serve for his own paintings. I mean that painting derives from painting, but is continually modified when it meets an artist who is not contaminated by the poetics of someone else, but appropriates methods, techniques, ways of giving strength to his own imagination. This is a painting, a triptych. It has Bacon’s style, but does not represent anything that Bacon’s work represents. It is a painting inspired by the criticism of the Italian political world and the refusal of the ‘historic compromise’. We are afraid of governments, afraid that someone will stand at a black pulpit or on a black throne. When I painted the black of the desk I was even reminded of Malevitch’s black square. And then there is a figure without a face getting up, in the act of taking off his jacket in readiness for command. If we want to digress to consider the subject-matter, I could have stolen the title from Goya, ‘The sleep of reason generates monsters’.
Immediately after the Triptych I worked at a group of new paintings: Man at the window 1964 , Man with a dog 1965 and The Ruling Class itself.
In this group of paintings there is, in comparison with my previous work, the addition of a geometrization above the figures or imprisoning them, locking them in, as in a cage, or giving them greater prominence, as in Man at the window, who is looking out from the inside. Even in Man with a dog there are two lines, almost pointing to the door out of which the master is coming, and the dog goes towards him. Above all in The ruling class we see some geometrical shapes overhanging the figures. There is a geometrization that was previously absent and that is very clear during this period. In commenting on these paintings I can say that every time that I have faced the problem of The Ruling Class – even the Triptych faced that problem – I have always spoken of it as if the reason could be found there – the root of the discomfort of contemporary man – almost as if really the job of the managerial classes is to make life easier for everybody. Whoever has the job of redistributing wealth and power, of making the rules, is rather, in effect, a figure who doesn’t have anything to say to others, but only to himself.
Today we speak of a political caste. Every time that I have represented anything concerning politics, I have always spoken as if it is a caste. And it is strange that even in a painting that was painted much later, in the eighties, but that is connected with these themes, called Roman Sunset, we see politicians bowing, kissing a naked woman who represents corruption, representing everything that a powerful Rome manages in inconceivable ways. As if to say that those who represent us represent nothing more than themselves, and that we are therefore alone in dealing with something that will never arrive, like the man, like men standing at a window and waiting for something, a person or an event, that will never come.
Once the painter and novelist Dino Buzzati, speaking of my painting, said that it reminded him of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, men waiting for something that will never happen. He was perhaps thinking of his The Desert of the Tartars, but, in fact, I do have an idea that Man cannot find something that he knows could exist, but that is hidden who knows where. After all, if I wanted to describe these characters, I would say that they propose the figure of a man who would like to wait and believe, but who has lost the faith for believing.
Alberto Sughi
For more info on Alberto Sughi see. www.albertosughi.com
Created by Alberto Sughi On 07/09/09 At 11:22 AM
It seems as though my best results are achieved through the continually mediated presence of an awareness and appreciation of an existence in which all the possible artifice of narration has lost its significance. 
The painting on my canvas seems to be of highly realistic. However, if you look carefully at it, you will see that the figures in it are completely isolated from each other. The composition does not represent a scene, but rather, it shows various situations. It is both all true and all false. I cannot illustrate: I pretend to tell a story, and this fictional work contains my idea of the world in which we live and of how to fix things. I don’t paint anything that is actually occurring, but always think of something different from what seems to be the subject of the painting. (…) The painting is the artist’s “journey” while it is in the studio, on the artist’s easel. Then it will acquire new energy, travelling through the eyes of those who are looking at it, adding and subtracting from it, finding references in it that the artist had not even imagined. At that moment the “journey” is no longer the artist’s, but that of the observer.
Our identity derives from a comparison with others, or even a rivalry, and is constructed through a formative process offering us cultural references, in the sense of knowledge of the world around us. 
However, I have always thought that painting is a kind of laboratory to gain an understanding of the artist, even going beyond what an artist actually thinks he believes. But it could also be said that art is able to unify what seems to have been divided. 
Although I have already done so in previous blogs usually I would prefer not to talk about my paintings, because the meaning that I attach to them is then transformed over time in the eyes of the spectator, into the thoughts of those who imagine something that the painter has not conceived, but which is still a perfectly legitimate way of interpreting the painting. Despite this, since I have recently spent a good deal of time reconstructing the meaning of my work (a reasonable task you will probably agree for an artist who will be eighty very soon) in this blog I will describe how almost twenty years ago I came to create a group of paintings (reproduced here alongside the blog) which I consider quite significant to understanding not only how my own work but also how a painting is born and how from this others may unexpectedly come into being.
In 1992, or the years before, there was the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of hope for an ideology that had affected the whole first half of this century and a conspicuous portion of the second half. Many people had believed in this ideology, the first great socialist revolution of the world. This idea of revolution was common place, the home of the thoughts, justice, and ideas that a great revolution promises. However, we know that all revolutions are unfortunately destined to be betrayed and, in the end, lead to corruption, fear and abandonment by the very people who had believed in them. And then I imagined a painting in red like the red flag of Communism, where the star is still visible, but everything is smashed and distorted. To create this painting I examined the painting of De Kooning in depth, because it seemed to me that, through those broken and continuous structures, I could more profoundly express the significance of this crisis. A man in the foreground, like a black silhouette, is leaving with a pair of suitcases, and the title is perhaps an indication to help understand the meaning. 
Going where? I immediately made another painting in this cycle still concerned with the same problem: Going where? Goodbye to the red house which also has writing going across the top of the house, in almost Cyrillic characters. Here, too, a man with suitcases is leaving this house, which is, perhaps, the house of his hopes and dreams. Then the subject became dilated and no longer concerned the fall, the implosion of Communism, but the destiny of man. So then, immediately afterwards, or, in some cases, even before this painting, I painted green paintings with men in a landscape or looking down from a terrace, and who seem to be lost in contemplation, all entitled Going where?, almost as though Man is in a critical, temporary situation and is searching for an identity inside a labyrinth, represented in this case by the natural world. This could have been a great moment, a problem set out before modern Man that he has to resolve, but as to how, that is a mystery. 
Then I made a very large painting, two meters by two meters thirty-five, entitled The game, more fantastic, or rather, more mysterious, in which I borrowed from Cézanne the silhouette of the two card players, while on the right a man looks as if he wants to know how this game is going to end. It is a red painting which, even if the characters’ silhouettes were not so clear, could be exhibited just for its background, almost like an abstract painting.
