«By losing my sight, I thought I would also lose my colors but I have colors in my life. I haven’t lost them, they are increasingly rooted in my heart.”
The painter Andrea Ferrero Sette, a native of Cagliari, is today – and until Saturday 13th – on display at the MEM in Cagliari: the theme is “Becoming a sea. Water, sound, wind and light”. Ah, he’s also blind, but that doesn’t stop him from his goals. «Of course, as my wife says, a blind painter who paints always makes the news» he explains «but I’m happy when people tell me that they felt emotions in front of my works. I prefer when my artistic talents emerge regardless of my disability.”
In the exhibition, his works related to the sea, the ones he is most fond of: «I am Sardinian, proud to be from Cagliari. He went to Poetto. We all have, some more, some less, the sea inside us: sometimes it is a calm sea, other times it is stormy. I like to tell it.”
“Becoming the sea. Water, sound, wind and light” is going very well: “I pass by there sometimes” says the artist. «It is incredibly beautiful that my works remain for a month in such a popular place, that people can see them and get excited.»
Yet, painting arrives by chance. Ferrero is a young graduate in Economics, he is 27 years old and works in a firm as an accountant when, unexpectedly, he receives an unfortunate diagnosis: retinitis pigmentosa. It’s 1998. «They told me it was degenerative, progressive and incurable. I thought my life was already marked, before I found out about the disease, but life offers us unexpected things.»
In 2010 Ferrero completely lost his sight and began a journey.
«A mourning to metabolize, that’s what it was. I was in my very personal well, in the dark and cold, and then I decided to be reborn into a new, more colorful life. This condition of mine allowed me to choose what I wanted to do and what I didn’t want along my path.»
It is no coincidence that his first work is “Summer Emotions” which can also be interpreted as “Summer Emotions”, in short, awakened, as if painting represented a way to be reborn into a new existence, to rise from the ashes of a bereavement faced to be filled with colour.
«In 2017 I met Annalisa Carta, a painter, who asked me to paint. At first, I said no, but then, also on the advice of my wife, I accepted.”
And there the painter was able to immerse himself in art. As a former sighted person, after all, he had colors within him. He kept them in his heart and in his mind.
His style? Feel the canvas with your hands. «I tried with the brushes, but something stopped me, they gave me a distance with the work that didn’t convince me: I therefore instinctively used my hands. There was no longer the limit of the brushes, I could feel the canvas, I could feel its contours, see with my hands where there was or was not colour. And I continued from there.”
Today Ferrero has a good life, he fills his days with things he loves to do and color flows through him along with the blood in his veins, but it hasn’t always been easy.
«Thanks to my character, the luck I had, my work, the many interests I have and my wonderful family who stood by me, I managed to climb back up. Of course,” he explains, “I don’t see this as a problem, but I feel like I have faced the disease and have a peaceful coexistence with it. I have also discovered many things that I would not have done as a sighted person and I have even done things in other ways that sighted people also do. Not seeing opened my eyes to what I really wanted to do, and what I didn’t want to do. The things I wanted to do I could do in an alternative way: I understood this.»
But he doesn’t give advice: «They gave it to me, but for each of us there is an individual path. Everyone has to find their own way back up. We need to think of failure not as a defeat but as a learning process. And do everything you want: if you succeed, fine, if not, never mind.”
And he closes with a maxim that everyone should take note of: «The darkness is not the end of everything, but it is possible to react and find ideas: we must make sure that ours is a happy life.»
The Ferrero exhibition at the MEM, as we said, will last until Saturday 13 April.
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