Salon Palermo

What if one of the answers to the problems of today's art world was the Salon? Let's try to think about it, without provocation. This format that sounds so dusty, so nineteenth-century and the bearer of injustices towards the new and experimentation, could perhaps also be appropriate for our days.

What immediate results can be obtained by using the exhibition method of the Salon? The first is to bring the work of art back to the center of the exhibition. Salon organizers must not follow or invent spurious themes or analyzes of the latest alleged stylistic or language evolutions of art, as often happens in exhibitions. This puts curators in check, who too often make works functional, and therefore secondary, with respect to the theory and idea that animates their exhibitions, as if they were just pieces of a machine, or an assembly line in which the artist ends up experiencing the same frustration as the Fordist worker unable to recognize himself in the product of his work.

On the contrary, in a Salon each work lives of its own independence and solitude, as a universe of its own, autonomous and complete; and you can simply select jobs that are deemed to be of quality. Even more this happens in the case of painting, blessed with physical and conceptual frames capable of keeping out the cunning and parasitic curatorships.

All this could make even more sense today, at a time when any type of art, any type of style, any type of theme is possible; a truth also applicable to painting, protagonist of this ours exhibition.

The revival of painting has in fact coincided with the opening to all kinds of expressive possibilities. The abstract has the same strength and the same topicality as the figurative. The visionary and surreal dream sounds alive as the research on geometric abstraction.

Salon Palermo it is an evident demonstration of this, albeit within a figurative context linked to a visionary dimension. In fact, the works on display here are held together, thanks to one of the very few lines that can be traced today within the painting, that path linked to a tradition that for simplicity could be defined surrealist, above all indebted to painters such as Leonora Carrington, or to the European expressionism between the two great wars.

In the case of Sabrina Annaloro (Palermo, 1989), the subjects sink into a mythological, archaic and timeless dimension, immersed in a surreal style and atmosphere with a strong narrative potential. She draw a lot from exotic and oriental-style paintings. Often her scenes see the body subject to processes of transformation and metamorphosis in which the boundary between man and nature, and that between man and animal, disappears completely.

Mattia Barbieri (Brescia, 1985) instead creates paintings in which the formal and pictorial aspect regains centrality. The painting is built by the painter following a very complex and rich process. The surface becomes the battlefield in which graphic signs, engravings, figures, and material details interact on a par with the actual pictorial composition. The visionary and almost alien subjects, although functional to enhance the pictorial nature of the painting, do not play a secondary role: they are a recurring element in which to decline the plastic elements of his painting.

Enne Boi (Cantù, 1989) is instead the artist who in this exhibition most recalls a certain expressionism of the last century, especially of German and Northern European roots. Although altered and deformed, the figure is often at the center of his paintings. But the formal aspect is also in this case the very purpose of the painting. The bodies and elements of nature are made wild and primitive through a painting that is both violent and elegant, which carries within it a classical and ancient soul. The oiled surface is often blurred by the use of the airbrush and spray.

Anna Capolupo’s painting (Lamezia Terme, 1983) was born from a privileged relationship with the genre of still life. The horizontal plane, almost always present in her paintings, becomes the stage of a calm surreal theater made up of elements of everyday life, anatomical details and magical narrative incidents. Often there is a chromatic dominant in which the picture is immersed, and from which a few elements skilfully differ, underlined precisely by their diversity, thus obtaining a disturbing and alienating effect.

Silvia Capuzzo (Merano, 1996) is the most "abstract" artist of the exhibition. But her wide and sinuous brushstrokes, from which the love for the pictorial material emerges, continue to cling to reality and representation. The bodies move fluidly in the scene and are made with few details: you can see above all arms, which acquire a central role. It is a virtuous and apparently fast painting, in which the alienating point of view and the enlargement of parts of reality contribute - together with the way of painting - to the creation of the final result.

The works of Cosimo Casoni (Firenze, 1990) are part of a trend that dates back to the Dada and conceptually eclectic painting of the last century. In this case, the painting is both an autopsy bed for painting and a playground in which to experiment and dedicate oneself to one's pleasure. The surfaces are populated by Cosimo with a multitude of elements of a different nature: the finely crafted figurative pictorial parts are brutally combined with tags stolen from the urban context, the graphics mix with the most violent signs of painting, such as scratches and scrapings, obtaining thus true autonomous pictorial landscapes.

Even the works of Gabriele Ermini (Firenze, 1996) live on this complexity of the pictorial surface, in which signs of a different nature coexist significantly, and in which classic colors mix with the airbrush and other techniques. Often the human figure is at the center of the scene in an almost sculptural way, rendered with acid and often flat colors but deformed in shapes in a way similar to what can be obtained through computers or digital animation.

Although the paintings of Alessandro Giannì (Roma, 1989) often have a subject taken from the internet or from new media, the final result is extremely pictorial and manages to become almost completely independent from its initial inspiration. In fact, the paintings are rendered with aggressive backgrounds and courageous color combinations. The images are violently deformed into results close to expressionism, and something magical and difficult to decipher always happens in his scenes.

Jimmy Milani (Savigliano, 1995) creates paintings in which the thoughtful and planned compositions made of flat painted backgrounds are obtained with a few distinct colors. The works draw heavily from the world of comics, acidic fairy tales, graphics and illustrations, transferring everything to a pictorial level kept independent through an uncommon ability to create powerful and magnetic images. It is as if Jimmy were able to combine the great tradition of Italian metaphysics with the world of low-fi videogames of the nineties.

With Mattia Sinigaglia (Castiglione delle Stiviere, 1989) we return to the world of nuanced and poetic painting in which magic, myth and scientific research mix in an enchanted way. Also in his case, as in Jimmy Milani, there is sometimes a recourse to three-dimensional shapes that interact with the pictorial surface, albeit with different results. The colors blend and mix, in a dreamed and dreamy reality, composed of symbolic elements as well as graphic signs.

This is the group of artists who arrived in the South, for the Salon Palermo. It is a cyclical migration, which has already happened in the past, of painting towards the sun, life, colors, heat. A necessary movement of painting, far from the hermeneutics and conceptualism of the north, to embrace the eroticism of vision, magic and mystery. Again. This time in Palermo, in Sicily, in that wedge of Europe that seems to be pushing into North Africa and the Middle East.