EdoardoSalvestrini.com

Reality and memory

Rossana Bossaglia

Presentation of the solo exhibition, “Arianna Sartori Arte”, Mantua, February 2007.

It is difficult to give a definition that renders in synthesis the character of Salvestrini. It would seem obvious to mention him as a figurative artist because, even where he appears to be oriented towards fancyful symbologies, his subjects are views, especially of cities, conducted with descriptive punctilio. We recognize the places, we feel the emotion of the colours according to the time of the day.
But the imprint, nevertheless, is that of a reminescence, as if he recalled the image from memory, not from direct relation. And not only: he brings the image back with exceptional fineness of details. So that from one side the kind of the atmosphere directs us towards specific environmental situations; from the other side the representative care draws us to identify ourselves with details of the environment, which they would have escaped from us without his intervention.
And not only: he represents among the most famous public spaces. Especially city-centre squares, architectural structures we have known for a long time. Yet, through his descriptive punctilio charged of emotions, those spaces appear to us as given back to memory, as recalled, not simply depicted, environments.

Among his rich and subtle iconography there are also ways of temporal combinations, as if the events of different times were going side by side together: that is precisely what happens in memory, where the present lives close to the past, without obliterating it. Some places of the city have now become historical also because of the events that happened there - let us think about piazza Fontana; although still in their historical distance, those places appear to us with absolute descriptive precision.

We might call that theme “the theme of remembrance”, which is then lived as mythical, but as if the myth dwelt in the present. The topics that are properly defined as mythological, for example, accompany the descriptive records, and are also relived not according to a historical revival of their representations in the classical era, but through the various ways through which they have been interpreted. Let us observe, for example, the dancing Muses, who have a mythological matrix but here reveal the eighteenth-century fascination of Watteau.
On the other hand the present, also meant as modern reality, lives with the past as it happens in the life of cities, where the secular building is however reality of the present, and is topical because it is how we feel it.

The Milan of the seventies (let us think of the flowering of skyscrapers that quickly follows the twentieth-century rationalism period of architecture) coexists with the past and the present in a kind of natural dynamism. It is this that Salvestrini knows how to seize splendidly (and emotionally for us): piazza San Alessandro appears transfigured in the same way as we see, in the representation of Salvestrini, piazza Missori: it is the square that we know directly, but at the same time it is as if it were recovered through the centuries; it is memory.