Salvo Pastorello Biography
Salvo Pastorello was born in Noto in 1952. During the 1970s, he began to exhibit his works nationally, but it was in the 1990s that he began to broaden his artistic range of action, exhibiting throughout the world. In 2011 he was invited to participate in the 54th International Art Exhibition LA BIENNIALE DI VENICE. Pastorello has always been attracted by civilisations, habits and customs very different from his own, and this has always been a constant in his life. He has always had the approach and sensitivity of an anthropologist in his travels, willing to observe, listen and understand other cultures to the point of deepest integration, without ever forgetting his identity and his artistic role. Of Sicilian origin but trained in Verona, he has developed a sunny style of painting, in which color becomes the protagonist and is applied with an instinctive and energetic brushstroke.
Despite the Polynesian experience of Bora Bora, where he lived for 7 years in search of a more "primitive" style, his tendency to use strong chromaticism has not disappeared. His return to Lake Garda allowed him to introduce stylized figures into his canvases, treated with vigorous chromaticism. His childhood and his history, together with the lands he has known, are often introduced into his works, sometimes erased by volitional signs as fragments of past meanings, other times multiplied to confirm their importance.
During his stay in Shanghai, he created works resulting from contact with oriental culture, influenced by the introduction of rice paper as a support and by the representation of typically Chinese paintings and situations. Chromaticism remains the true protagonist in all his works. Just as blue represented his Polynesian experience, now gold, red and ideograms become the Chinese emblem and the transposition of the oriental atmosphere in the artist's works.
His love for "nomadism", experienced both physically and culturally, represents a constant stimulus in his artistic production and is part of a broader need in our mass society to experiment with opportunities for contact between different styles of life and thought, between physical spaces and their influence on behavior models in environments completely outside one's own.
