Salvatore Fiorello’s London Studio
‘Navarino’, Salvatore Fiorello, Oil on linen, 23 x 30cm, 2024
‘Penumbra’, Salvatore Fiorello, Oil on linen, 20 x 25cm, 2024
Blue Shop Gallery presents
'Small Hours'
Salvatore Fiorello | Gallery 2
13th - 30th June 2024
PV Drinks Wednesday 12th June 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Salvatore (b.1976) is a painter based in Hackney, East London. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, to an Italian father and British mother. After spending his early childhood in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, he returned to the UK in the mid 1980s. He completed his BA in Birmingham in 1998 and MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 2000.
‘Small Hours’
Salvatore’s work explores peripheries within the landscape, reoccurring motifs such as fences, trees/foliage and windows act as both boundaries and portals, offering suggestions of what might be happening beyond the frame or behind what is visible. The viewer’s gaze is restricted somehow, allowing only a slice of the whole to be revealed. Although painted on a small scale, the scenes transmit potentially cinematic or filmic portrayals of space and time. Functioning as in-between states, these everyday scenes and places, often nocturnal, simultaneously evoke both a sense of ambiguity and familiarity. Despite the connections to real physical places, the paintings ultimately explore the human condition, contemplation, memory and the subconscious.
Salvatore describes his working process as starting from taking photographs when out on long cycling trips. Developing a personal connection with each location helps him affirm a more instinctive response to the real place. Rather than making drawings or sketches, he begins by painting on paper or more often directly on to linen. Very thin paint is used to map out the images and a reduced approach to colour, focusing more on tonal values.
“The locations of the paintings are mainly in London and occasionally the images are from trips abroad in France and Italy but I’m interested in the works having a sense of ambiguity so that people can read them in a more intimate way. I think if specifics are spelled out it can stifle the viewer from attaching their own feelings of nostalgia and deja vu to the work.” - Salvatore Fiorello, June 2024
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'Lane', Salvatore Fiorello, Oil on linen, 28 x 35cm, 2021
'Threshold', Salvatore Fiorello, Oil on linen panel, 13 x 18cm, 2023
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2023 Irving Gallery, Oxford.
2008 Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield.
2005 BLOC Projects, Sheffield.
2004 Gibsone Jessop Gallery, Toronto, Canada.
2003 SUMO, Sheffield.
2003 BLOC Projects, Sheffield.
2001 Laurent Delaye Gallery, London.
RECENT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024 Royal Hibernian Academy, 194th Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland.
‘Constellations’, Irving Gallery, Oxford.
Royal Scottish Academy, 198th Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, Scotland.
‘Works On Paper 6’, Blue Shop Gallery, Online Exhibition, London.
2023 ‘SFSA Painting Open’, noformat Gallery, Deptford, London.
‘Art on a Postcard’, Gathering, Soho, London.
‘MEPAINTSME Annual Open Call’, Online Exhibition, Arden, North Carolina, USA.
‘Works on Paper 5’, Blue Shop Gallery, Online Exhibition, London.
Royal Academy of Arts, 255th Summer Exhibition, London.
Royal Hibernian Academy, 193rd Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland.
Royal Scottish Academy, 197th Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, Scotland.
2022 ‘Awake Arise’, Irving Contemporary, Oxford.
‘SFSA Painting Open’, noformat Gallery, Deptford, London.
‘ING Discerning Eye’, The Mall Galleries, London.
‘Art on a Postcard’, Winter Auction, The Bomb Factory, Covent Garden, London.
‘Wales Contemporary’, Waterfront Gallery, Milford Haven & Oxo Gallery, London.
‘Think Of Me With Kindness’, Gage Gallery, KIAC, Sheffield.
Royal Academy of Arts, 254th Summer Exhibition, London.
Royal Scottish Academy, 196th Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, Scotland.
COLLECTIONS
Private collections in the UK, France, Italy, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, Canada and U.S.A.