In his "Autobiography", Andrea Salvino uses different visual elements that characterized his production through the years: movie stills, details of master paintings, images of celebrities and many others.
"I was not there, but I do remember something. In 1977 there was 'the expulsion of Lama' and I was 8. In 1978 Aldo Moro was killed and I was 9. I remember the violence. Our violence and state violence. I remember robberies at great warehouses that once was Upim and at the post offices. Proletarian expropriations. Bag snatching, police vehicles."
Autobiography is a series published by Tonini Editore. Each volume is dedicated to an artist, who is free to carry out the topic of the autobiography by means of text or visual supports. Belonging to a series, each book has the same size and maximum amount of pages (64). The selection of the artists participating to the series is coordinated by a scientific committee made up of six renown personalities in the world of the art research and collection: Pedro Barbosa (collector and founder of the Coleção Moraes - Barbosa), Alex Bacon (art historian), Claudio Guenzani (gallery owner in Milan, owner of the Studio Guenzani),
Michele Lombardelli (artist, composer, typographer and consultant for several publishing houses), Shwetal Ashvin Patel (writer and researcher, founding member of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale), Christoph Schifferli (collector and scholar), and Valentino Tonini (director of the homonymous publishing house).
The artistic research of Andrea Salvino (born 1969 in Rome) is strictly connected with the Italian XXth Century history and draws inspiration from the political, social and cinematographic iconography in Italy and Europe in that period until today. His work can be considered as page of unofficial storiography, written in images, anedoctes and details of other visual documents. The subjects that Salvino brings to life in his drawn papers and painted canvases are historical frames identified amid numerous photographs, old postcards, books or prints, selected for their iconographic motives, particularly meaningful and capable to describe their time and culture of origin. Political events, war, pornography, erotism, fashion and cinema shapes in Salvino's drawing a sequence of fragments of a past world that return to the viewer a piece of its own identity. Salvino, without taking any political or ideological position, reveals with his works the importance and the power of images as elements that induce people to remember, to evoke an historical fact or a past experience. And finally, to recognize a world of affinities that goes beyond all taboos. Subjects are treated by Andrea Salvino with a nearly obsessive familiarity, through a quick and marked trait able to transmit force and to nourish the unconscious of the viewer.
