Salvatore Puglia

Salvatore Puglia was born in Rome in 1953.
Perhaps one is not born haphazardly in a city that is 27 centuries old, and which combines such a History. In fact, it was towards historical research, in its most rigorous concept, and towards scientific research that Salvatore Puglia at first put all his efforts, before deciding, with the same scholarly approach, to turn his mind towards art.

The body of visual artworks that he has undertaken since 1986, is accompanied by investigations as to the documentary sources of images, following a practice that deems the traces left by history as material to be transformed. He superimposes the ruthless documentary precision, the mystery of multi-dimensional enigmas, the supposed naivety of a never far off childhood, enclosed within the shadows of lost paradises, and the terrible condition of the human being in his own times. His referential bestiary invites an extremely ancient exoticism to haunt the space and the framework of his oeuvre.

It is a great zoo, like that of long past kings and emperors, which imbues the remains and which is embedded, individual by individual, in those desolate landscapes, soiled or abandoned. According to the moments, according to the places, according to their history, the animal springs forth as evidence of our incongruities, echoing our environmental destructions, in a phantasmagoria of our aborted wishes. Are they the sublimated documents of a rather despicable reality wherein everyone, powerless, would find it banal to take part? Are they condemnations to exist within a period that displays a blissful pacifism, whereas it projects the worse, without even the faintest hope of a hypothetical improvement?
Maybe, quite simply, it is a work in which the animal’s place is so essential that the human’s place depends on it. And that is already a great deal.

Salvatore Puglia is represented by the Galerie SIT DOWN, Paris