Sandro Trapani

In September of 2022 Beautiful Bizarre, an International Visual Art Magazine, nominated Sandro as one of the top twenty-five sculptors in the world. The sculpture section of the competition was sponsored by Yasha Yong Projects.

ABOUT

Sandro Trapani

Sandro Trapani lives and works in Potchefstroom, South Africa. For his master’s degree, Trapani’s research focused on how, as an artist, thinking about behaviour influences how we alter behave, and therefore how behaviour alters our thinking. Drawing on the past, heritage, and ethnography, and how we engage with memory can lead to evolved narratives. The cyclical nature of these kinds of reflections can become obscured, absurd and obsessive. The absurd is woven into the fabric of human existence, and the nature of art. Over the past two and a half decades Trapani has explored the Sisyphean nature of the Search for Truth, and how his own truth becomes less and less obtainable, or further obscured, along this journey of discovery.

Part of that journey involves reflecting on his own heritage. For Trapani personal history holds much speculation about where, when, and how events truthfully unfolded or what heirlooms, images, and texts really mean. This can be said about all history, in particular ancient histories. However, in much of his family history information thereof is built on speculation as his father was unclear about his own ancestry growing up as an orphan in Florence, Italy. It is in these facts that the mysterious becomes relevant and engaging. Fields such as archeology do not answer all our questions about our pasts, but the artifacts, relics and objects discovered capture our minds and allow our imaginations to explore possibilities and wonder. New narratives are built on old information.

READ THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Workshop Registration

BUST Sculpture Workshop at Aardklop, Potchefstroom.

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Artist’s statement

Trapani reflects on a sense of beauty that is found in memories and experiences. A particular focus is given to the forgotten and the lost.

The recollections of people, places and moments can be nostalgic, even melancholic, and are at times fleeting. Memories become blurred. Remembering them accurately often leads to memory overlap. This overlap can be subtle, and might even go unnoticed, and as a result, the narratives may change, adjusted to suit the way in which we desire to preserve the memory. Over time, there is a sense of the historical but a loss of milieu. The portraits resonate with personal experiences not quite fully recalled. They become archival, reclaiming memories that recall multiple experiences all in a single sculpture.

There is a sense of sadness present in the portraits. Sorrow is suggested though the familiar-yet-less-identifiable elements introduced, such as ancient architecture, or due to the fractured, “dissolving” surfaces presented. The legitimacy of the past fades and a sense of longing comes to the fore.

The portraits Trapani creates are nonspecific, meaning that they are created from many sources and do not represent a single individual. Rather they are accumulations of many different recollections and references– a collection of beautiful but somewhat illusive memories.

MEET THE ARTIST

The Tragodia Series

The artist reflects on a sense of beauty that is redolent of memory and experience in the Tragodia Series. The places and moments of nostalgia, and at times melancholia, are recollections that are not always definitive or distinctive but are often fleeting and at times unidentifiable, as if rediscovered in another context. There is a sense of the historical but a loss of milieu. The portraits resonate with a personal experience not quite fully preserved. They become archives of collected or reclaimed memories that occasionally reveal themselves – as if accidentally found while searching for something else.