Sidival Fila, the brother-artist big name in Brazilian contemporary art, is on display at the Tridentine Diocesan Museum

From July 13 to November 4, 2019, the Museo Diocesano Tridentino will host a solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Sidival Fil a (Paranà, 1962), a Franciscan Friar Minor and one of the most influential voices in contemporary art internationally. An artist of extraordinary creative ability, Sidival Fila is also present with the work Golgotha at the 58th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, currently underway in the lagoon city.

The exhibition at the Venice Biennale is only the latest stage in a human and artistic journey of extraordinary interest. Born in 1962 in Brazil’s Parana State, Sidival Fila moved to Italy in 1985 in search of an artistic and personal identity. Here he deepened his interest in art while developing a spiritual vocation that led him to join theOrder of Friars Minor of St. Francis of Assisi. Ordained in Rome in 1999, Fila will exercise his ministry at the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome and the Rebibbia Prison, dividing his life between the Convents of Vitorchiano and Frascati. His entry into the order corresponds to a voluntary interruption of his artistic activity, abandoned for eighteen years. However, the artistic vocation will return to impose its presence, with renewed awareness. In fact, in 2006 he began a path, no longer interrupted, that led him to measure himself with different techniques, materials and compositional solutions. From humble materials to discarded objects, to textiles mostly ancient and used in the context of liturgical celebrations.

In Sidival Fila’s hands, textiles are transformed and from ’waste’ they become compositional elements of a new narrative that interweaves light, color and form. Fila’s works are not ’sacred’; yet spirituality is their deepest object: “In my research,” he says, “there is nothing that refers figuratively or explicitly to the religious, but there is a reference to a tension toward the transcendent. My desire is to make matter spiritual from a perceptual point of view, to make it fluid, to make color a chromatic energy. These are dimensions that refer to our conception of spirit: which, even for the secular world, is light, transparency, lightness.” For Sidival Fila, "sacredness is not in the subject that a work represents, a Christ or a Madonna, as much as in the fact that there is something that communicates and goes beyond. True art is always imbued with sacredness."

In his abstract creations, the artist uses needle, thread, salvaged objects, old canvases. With thread Sidival Fila sews up wounds, creates relationships, founds new symmetries. His work becomes a living metaphor for actions necessary for our society, which place relationships at the center: with oneself, with the other from oneself, with the world, with life and a spiritual dimension of it, with the past and the present. Themes dear to the Tridentine Diocesan Museum, which with Sidival Fila’s solo exhibition intends to continue an already ongoing dialogue with contemporary art and the most pressing issues of our time. Also evident is the connection between the exhibition and the collection of liturgical vestments from the churches of the diocese that the museum displays in the permanent itinerary.

The exhibition is enriched by the screening of a documentary that recounts the life of Brother Sidival from an unprecedented point of view, that of a confrere, Brother Francesco Di Pede, who succeeds in bringing out the man, the friar, the friend, through a lucid and poetic search in the folds of the real everyday.

For all information visit the official website of the Tridentine Diocesan Museum.

Pictured: Sidival Fila, Untitled (installation 14 Via Crucis elements), detail (2014; restored and sewn World War II textiles, 55x44 cm)

Source: press release

Sidival Fila, the brother-artist big name in Brazilian contemporary art, is on display at the Tridentine Diocesan Museum

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