Sergio Fermariello was born in Naples in 1961.
He interrupted his university studies in Natural Sciences to devote himself exclusively to drawing and painting.
He initially recovered the familiar visual lexicon, in an attempt to capture time and memory. Towards the mid-80s his drawing tends to grainy images, loses focus on the object, liquidates its intimate narratives with forced blow-up work, making "the form invisible and the content empty", as the author declares. What remains is a repeated sign, obstinate in its fixation, which continues to scratch the paper by inertia and from which the warrior will emerge, an icon that will accompany Fermariello's work up to his most recent works, including Guerrieri-scrittura (2017), entered the collection of MADRE. Starting from a sign, a tiny pictogram recognizable in the stylized figure of a warrior obsessively repeated, the artist creates "unlimited writing", covering the entire surface of the canvas. Fermariello defines himself as a "writer of a single word" which, starting from the shorthand signifier of the warrior alone, he repeats like a mantra, nullifying any other hermeneutic attempt at interpretation. And, in fact, in his work the sign does not refer to another sign, but reiterates itself in its own semantic self-referentiality. Like a Zen monk, the artist cultivates the sign by creating a linguistic short circuit that refers to "the inarticulate cry of the origins and the end of his dialological presumptions", explains the artist.
In 1989 Fermariello received his first important recognition with the Saatchi & Saatchi international prize for young artists in Milan. From that same year he began an intense collaboration with the Lucio Amelio Gallery, where he exhibited in 1989, 1991 and 1992. In 1993 Achille Bonito Oliva dedicates a personal room to him in the "Padiglione Italia" of the XLV International Biennale of Art in Venice. In 2004 he presented in New York, at Pier 17, The traveling installation: Avviso ai Naviganti. In 2005 one of his works was acquired by the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, in the contemporary art pavilion. In July 2009 he presented the installation Migranti at the MAC Museum in Niteròi, Brazil; this exhibition was subsequently re-proposed at the PAN Museum in Naples. In 2013, Building one, a financial skyscraper in Canary Wharf (London), acquired two of his major works.
