REVERSE OSMOSIS 2020

Curator: Here we have Sergio Mario Illuminato's "Reverse Osmosis," a mixed-media piece from 2020 incorporating found objects. I find it so intriguing. What catches your eye initially? Editor: Well, the texture grabs me. It’s aged, distressed almost, with this solitary keyhole staring back. There's a certain melancholy that I feel about it, an antique memory trying to persist. It reminds me of an abandoned cottage or maybe a forgotten box filled with letters. Curator: Exactly! The found object is layered with such meaning through its surface alone. But consider 'reverse osmosis'—this push-and-pull, a filtering. Could it suggest a selection of memories or ideas, deciding what we keep and what we discard? Editor: I hadn’t thought of it like that, but now that you say it... this worn surface acting as a kind of membrane, letting some things through while blocking others. Makes me think about the narratives we create, or even, the sanitization that art itself undergoes to become palatable in a museum space. Curator: Beautifully put. And consider how this process exists on many scales—from the individual psyche to institutional display practices. The abstraction evokes rather than dictates these meanings, inviting our own projections and filtering mechanisms to come into play. I wonder how the history of abstract expressionism plays into that concept as well, as a moment of profound emotional interiority being performed publicly. Editor: It almost feels like he's inviting the viewer to be the key, or at least ponder what secrets this surface guards. Though to be fair, that can also be read as being excluded, maybe a sense of inaccessible stories of histories. Curator: Indeed, that's where its power resides. It’s less about the specific object or historical anecdote and more about universal experience—time's effect, remembering, filtering and preserving. An evocative palimpsest that holds space for personal resonance. Editor: A testament to how the most mundane objects can, when viewed through an artistic lens, provoke complex introspection. It definitely stuck with me. Curator: For sure. Illuminato really transformed discarded material into a compelling metaphor for consciousness.