Salon Palermo 4
A group show on contemporary Italian painting
Salon Palermo 4 (2024), the fourth edition of Salon Palermo: a group show on contemporary Italian painting. 11 July – 23 August 2024, RizzutoGallery, Palermo. 10 artists, 39 works, curated by Antonio Grulli and Francesco De Grandi.
But this year some of the paintings overflow into three-dimensionality, a novelty compared to previous editions.
Fourth edition, ten artists: from Sicily to Venice, from Turin to Bulgaria. The selection grows out of meetings, exhibitions and studio visits; the Academies of Fine Arts confirm their central role, and painting starts to step out of the frame.
Artists
Giovanni Bongiovanni
His research focuses on the themes of the sacred and the void. He paints images that are part of his daily life and chooses to alter them with ambiguous figures or elements. The work takes shape from traces of ordinary contexts: lush, wild and apparently abandoned vegetation and/or characters sharing the same space, with no placement in time.
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Michele Bubacco
His approach to painting is raw and visceral, with deliberate strokes and a reduced palette that emphasises the anguish and despair of his figures. His canvases, gestural and at times violent, present an implicit narrative in which figurative elements are fragmented, leaving the viewer only a partial point of entry into the chaotic events that seem to unfold.
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Carlos Casuso
Carlos Casuso’s artistic practice is rooted in painting and drawing, in which he seeks to combine different media. His work is influenced by the aesthetics and techniques of different cultures; this fusion aims to create images that subtly bring together these disparate influences.
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Benedetta Giampaoli
Her research is based on the need to retrace personal suggestions through their translation into painting: the aim is to approach a fluid figuration, free from any specific temporal definition, in the belief that images need to arrive in painting in order to come to rest, to be suspended from the flow of time. Everyday experience leaves traces, memories, but also scars, which are reworked and made visible in a new guise on the painted surface. She considers her paintings as pieces of a puzzle-enigma or parts of a labyrinth: often the image is not resolved within the limits of the painted surface but needs to continue onto the next canvas to be better understood.
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Gabriele Massaro
His research is a reading of the depth of painting: depth understood both as the tangible fact of pictorial layering and of painting’s placement in space, and as an interpretive and imaginative possibility of reality. The result is a body of work that expresses analytical reasoning but is also the simulacrum of a veiled, subtle meaning, barely evoked.
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Alessandro Miotti
Alessandro Miotti works within a dialectic between imagination and reality. The visual language he uses in each painting bears no relation to his other works and shows a refracted vision of the imagination. Form is approached from a mythological place and then translated into a progressive series of definitions, with figures and places acting as archetypes within the narrative of the work. Visually, the fulfilment of desire and its denial act in balance, with a semiotics both familiar and unfamiliar, moving away from the everyday towards the borders of the symbolic and the real.
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Marco Paleari
His work takes as its model certain iconographies from the history of Italian and, more broadly, European painting (in particular the Renaissance and Mannerism), offering a contemporary reinterpretation of their forms through tableaux vivants created by pencil tracing. The painting process is therefore divided into two consecutive steps: a quick, incisive drawing, free of any virtuoso impulse, with which he outlines the shapes of the objects and people placed on or in front of the canvas, obtaining generic silhouettes that are nonetheless descriptive of a presence/absence, understood as the testimony of a passage; and then the slow, deliberate irruption of hatching and paint within these shapes, in order to give them a certain form of life, a sort of activation of the silhouettes.
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Anastasiya Parvanova
For Anastasiya Parvanova, painting is the medium that gives her access to a world of infinite possibilities. It is as if it allowed her to divide our world into other, parallel worlds, letting her travel and explore her imagination. It is a form of knowledge through which she can observe, clothe or even disguise her lived experience within the painting, in different configurations. It is therefore an exercise that does not separate experience and life from practice; a tool that allows her to interpret reality as a continuous alternation and transformation of thoughts and experiences, of energy and matter.
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Pierluigi Scandiuzzi
His work is based above all on depicting objects and situations that most people would call banal, obvious and even ugly. In his view, what we tend to consider obvious and insignificant actually has the capacity to reveal, in a deeper and more authentic way, countless aspects of existence that are hard to reach from broader, more elaborate or grandiloquent perspectives. His works thus take the form of fragments, often heterogeneous, that aim to restore or highlight the dignity and the historical and symbolic value that every object holds, outside any hierarchy: grandmother’s old candelabrum, a kitsch ornament, a tennis ball, a planet in the starry night, a frayed and worn wicker carpet beater.
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Maria Giovanna Zanella
In Maria Giovanna Zanella’s works, the paint travels across the surface like soft, throbbing skin. The world that comes to life involves feelings and people to whom mainstream imagery pays no attention: corpulent, tender and hairy men, real lovers, sensitive and passionate, who declare their need to exist through the most intense and direct closeness.
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Installation views
The Salon wall
Antonio Grulli
Salon Palermo reaches its fourth edition. Enthusiasm intact and still many artists to show. Italy in recent years has been truly generous with painters, in every corner of it. And Salon Palermo has managed to carve out an important role in the reconnaissance of new Italian figurative painting. Many new names on everyone's lips today have passed through here. Again this year, as in previous editions, the selection of artists called to exhibit is the result of meetings, exhibitions visited and studio visits undertaken during the preceding months by myself and by maestro De Grandi.
And like every year, at the beginning of July, our annual migration takes place, now a fixed appointment. We go back to the sun, the life, the colours, the warmth. We have realised how much we need it, we have realised how good it does us. To embrace with even greater strength the eroticism of vision, magic and mystery. Again. Always in Palermo, in the heart of the city; perfect theatre for daytime, and especially nighttime, excursions in its neighbourhoods, among museums, bars, squares paved with grey and red stones, Guttuso, Antonello da Messina, Pisanello, to breathe in all the life that can enter our lungs. Palermo that for us is a thousand chats, endless sweats, meetings; unique school of art and life. Palermo that in years hostile to painting represented a place of resistance to homologation and freedom. In that wedge of land that seems like a strip of Europe torn and pulled towards North Africa and the Middle East.
In Salon Palermo, all the works can be traced back to a figuration with a visionary matrix. The works in the exhibition are linked to each other thanks to one of the very few lines that can be traced within painting today, that path linked to a tradition that for simplicity could be defined as surrealist or that refers to European expressionism between the two great wars. But this year some of the paintings overflow into three-dimensionality, a novelty compared to previous editions.
As always in this mapping of new painting, we have tried to cover the different Italian geographies as much as possible; and the central role of the Academies of Fine Arts is confirmed.
Opening & moments
Laser, level, tape measure · Opening night
- Salon Palermo 4, quarta edizione della mostra collettiva di pittura da RizzutoGallery — Tiziana R. ↗
- RizzutoGallery: pittura contemporanea in mostra con la collettiva "Salon Palermo" — Redazione Balarm ↗
- Salon Palermo 4 (scheda mostra) ↗
- SALON PALERMO 4 ↗
- “Il sole, la vita, i colori, il calore” | Salon Palermo 4, Rizzuto Gallery — Chiara Bucolo ↗
- Self-analysis of a cowboy. Interview with the painter Alessandro Miotti — Giulia Botteri ↗