L’ombra della casa celeste | Sartor (Salvatore Vitagliano) 2022
curated by Gianluca Collica

Salvatore Vitagliano is an artist whose extraordinarily dense and compelling painting remains largely unknown to wider audiences. He has chosen to remain faithful to his own vision, rejecting every shortcut. As he writes in "A Ritroso", to understand the contemporary one must traverse the history of art back to its origins, immersing oneself in the worlds of the primitive and the mad, and recomposing this accumulated knowledge into a new language.
His painting thus traverses history and projects itself into the present with remarkable ease. Ancient traces emerge from his painted surfaces, embedded in the material or intersected by more agile contemporary marks. Encountering his work is never an immediate experience: the passage of time spent looking gradually reveals a practice grounded in the skilful concealment and preservation of its own memory.
"L’Ombra della Casa Celeste", the large-scale painting from which the exhibition takes its title, encapsulates his private and pictorial universe. Like a vast book, the work appears to generate a bipolar cosmos in which painting and narrative continually reverberate against one another, while perception oscillates between objectivity and concept. Space, time, and narrative remain indeterminate, suspended within an enigmatic imaginary that reveals itself only through an increasingly attentive and empathetic gaze.
The series of portraits presented in the exhibition, resembling votive icons, embodies a form of painting matured through an intense process of reflection upon both subject and practice. The faces emerge from a texture that initially appears almost “schizophrenic”, but gradually reveals itself as rational, sophisticated, and carefully balanced. The surface thereby becomes a harmonious and pulsating composition.
It is precisely in this pulsating quality that Sator’s language may be recognised: rooted as much in the primordial human need to express belonging and identity as in the transcendent imagery of the classical world, Byzantine abstraction, Renaissance humanism, Metaphysics and Surrealism, the chromatic force of the Fauves, and the principles of the German Gestalt tradition. The artist looks to history without either deference or complacency, engaging it instead in a continuous confrontation in pursuit of a new gesture—one that remains deliberately unresolved. Better to attempt than to become imprisoned by the seductions of a school or established style.
"Icona Mistica", the second large-scale work in the exhibition and a painting that has been exhibited several times over the years, is essential to understanding Sator’s poetics. His research assumes an almost monastic dimension: a journey “backwards” towards the essence of the universe, closely aligned with Taoist thought and with the possibility of retracing successive actions back to their originating principle. Painting thus becomes an exercise in ascending towards the very essence of painting itself, until the artwork and the artist’s gesture become inseparable.
For Sator, a painting is complete only when it definitively leaves the studio. It is therefore unsurprising that several works in the exhibition were created by intervening upon paintings dating from the 1970s. This apparently radical practice reveals a conception of painting as an open-ended process: there can be no definitive model, because to participate in becoming is to accept change. It is through this continual transformation that the artist seeks to move beyond what is already known and to approach, as closely as possible, the truth.