In 1997, the art critic and curator Lorenzo Benedetti wrote:[15] [...] In Sarra ci troviamo di fronte ad una intensa sinteticità dal punto di vista del processo formale a vantaggio di una maggiore concentrazione al dato concettuale… L'animale, i paesaggi e i volti vengono stilizzati fino al limite del riconoscibile [...]([...] With Sarra we are faced with an intense conciseness from the perspective of the formal process in favour of a greater concentration on the conceptual factor… The animal, the landscapes and the faces are stylised to the limit of being recognisable [...])He played for the national youth teams, making his debut at sixteen in the Italian Series A basketball championship with the Fortitudo Bologna team.

[26] The artist was invited to take part in the Aperto '93 Emergency/Emergenza[3][4][5] - 45th Venice Biennale, where he created an environment consisting of a long wooden platform[27] in chipboard with three paintings on the walls featuring: Iguane,[28] Paesaggio[29] and Autoritratto.

In the paintings after 1997, the artist poses with his 'sign-drawing', being continuous and abstract, various elements – faces, zoomorphic groups, buildings with unknown geometries – that insist upon previous pictorial composition processes that are not entirely erased to reveal further combinatorial forms.

This is the same direction in which Sarra heads when painting 'from real life' inside the WAX Kultúrgyár in Budapest and the Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană in Bucharest for the exhibition Altered States – Are you Experienced?

In 2011, Sarra published perché la spiaggia si assottiglia dopo le Nàiadi,[42][43] a book in which he collates a series of drawings and writings focused on the city of Pescara.

Il tentativo di dipingere due quadri uguali sposta l'attenzione del pubblico sull'abilità pittorica, la copia, l'indifferenza.

When this ration ceases to exist, icebergs can overturn with deafening sounds, showing the part which has been hidden for millennia.Traces of the theoretical processes underlying his works can be found in the short film My Painting Technique (2009, 2015).

[48] Since the early Nineties, Sergio Sarra has been exploring the iconic nature of painting, (and of sculptural installations and performances) to approach things through an abstract comprehension, while also conjuring up ancestral figures: "it would be important for me to be able to make a really archaic drawing, that can be recognized only by one's consciousness, and has never been seen in real life".For Sarra, the manual aspect of drawing is akin to a sort of imponderable writing, executed "from life" but detached from any interest in spatial composition; "the color must only be meaningful, not descriptive", and "a painting is finished when it resists the company of the other work in the studio.

"Each piece is generated by an observing consciousness, that moves within autobiographical spaces and cultural affiliations, interrelating signs in redundant sequences: architectural antinomies, dualities, border zones, specious repetitions; transparent grids and aporias.His home studio project is a clear form that interprets one of the artist's favorite landscapes: a protected space, personal and familiar, that fosters suggestions and ideas, where Sergio Sarra has organized his own painting possibilities.