/ PRESENTATION
EGS, Towards an Imperfect Picture
Extract from the critic text by Carlo McCormick
This exhibition, specifically conceived for SPAZIOC21, performs its migratory meaning in its curatorial decisions, with half of the works created in Finland and half in Italy. This applies not only to the glass works made at the Finnish glassworks of Lasismi or the legendary Seguso Vetri d’Arte furnace, in Murano, near Venice, but also the paintings and watercolors included in the show itself. In the first we see how EGS plies the different techniques and capabilities of each glass art tradition towards his own ends, as well as in the pictures get some measure of the changing landscape he occupies, the quality of light and range of color variable by place. The art of EGS abounds with flaws, irregularities, deviations, and disturbances, random as if by chance, but deliberate like stubbornness, a reluctance to give in to conformity. EGS wholly appreciates most defects as the defining idiosyncrasies of humanity and the natural world. The artist allows the possibility of imperfection because he is invested in the process rather than beholden to the end result. That kind of determined indetermination seems as much a part of his character as it is of his philosophy and aesthetics. He’s interested in rules, but he likes breaking them too. He never loses sight of the overall outline - especially when it comes to spelling out E-G-S as he does in every work - but it’s how he somehow colors outside the lines, the way he brings a certain looseness to the rigor, where we feel the joy. He adheres to just enough that we can recognize the hand of an accomplished artist, but all that finesse discloses an unmistakable gesture of disobedience. His fine art of straying off the expected path, however, isn’t a matter of being contrary, it’s simply a case of being curious. There is something delightfully abnormal in the images and representations that EGS highlights. Perpetually off-balance, bound to tradition insofar as it can disregard its orthodoxies, and built of impossible contradictions, the majesty of EGS’ constructions is that they sustain themselves against the odds, reflecting the disorder, degeneration and instability of the world into which they are actualized. Watercolors, glassware, even the most paintings on canvas, typically offer a degree of visual comfort, but I suspect the artist shuns the comfortable as he does permanence and perfection. EGS investigates these media thoroughly, instigating frailties and foibles into the language of beauty. Wonderfully, the slippage from perfection is built into the mediums he chooses, from the unforgiving nature of watercolors, where it is impossible to correct your mistakes, or glassblowing’s standards of craft where anything less than seamless faultlessness is a failure, to the root of EGS practice, graffiti, which is typically hurried, often interrupted and subject to myriad unpredictable factors, yet unmercifully public. Whatever EGS makes is always a kind of improbability, a success that probably didn’t go to plan.