Bart Sanciolo

Bart Sanciolo is a Sicilian-born artist who emigrated to Australia in 1968. Sanciolo maintains strong cultural links with Italy in his ongoing artistic practice.

Sanciolo received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from RMIT in 1976. He was awarded his first major public commission the following year, and has completed several public and private commissions throughout his forty-year career.

Primarily a sculptor and painter, Sanciolo develops unique interpretations of the human form and the environment as subject matter. Sanciolo’s work explores intuitive relationships between line, form and design, resulting in contemporary interpretations in response to classical inclinations.

I am interested in the uniqueness of interpreted reality where the human form or the environment is the context and the catalyst for response. I choose to use, interpret and manipulate the human form as subject matter because I want to acknowledge that the Human Form is fundamental in art, and that abstraction is meaningless without an implied Human Form. I find that abstraction, perspective, distortion etc, fail when they do not act as devices for reaching an expressive climax and I understand that abstraction cannot be an end in itself because it cannot exist out of a defined context.

I gain joy from the intuitive relationships between line, form, tone and colour; expressed through in interplay; to disclose – artist and viewer, and I intentionally construct my artworks using geometry as springboard and as a concerted structure. This geometry is at once both physical and metaphysical in-so-far that it exists within the artwork, in the interaction between artwork and viewer and in its relationship with place, time and context.

I believe that artists create works through a process of reasoning – be it conscious, unconscious, visual or otherwise. This creative process is activated by intuition and curiosity and has a myriad of variations and a multitude of factors that influence it. Similarly, I perceive that there cannot be a single and predictable process for all artists. Each artist discovers or invents a unique manner of seeing and creating. Over time, this may evolve or remain static, but it is always a personal way of experiencing, reacting and responding to life.
-Bart Sanciolo, 2018

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