"A brush lent to everyday life" is how Gloria De Salve defines herself.
An artist of varied nuances, she moves between the conceptual and the figurative.
A graduate of art school, she continued her studies and earned a degree in
the history of modern and contemporary art.
"Precarious artist" is another way she describes herself;
she snatches moments from time to tell her daily life and emotional states,
translating them onto canvas — and beyond — stroke by stroke.
Her works do nothing less than shake "the dust accumulated in everyday life from the soul" (P.Picasso).
In Gloria De Salve's work, painting becomes a place for the stratification of memory. Surfaces of canvas and mulberry paper host fragments of paper, words from old antique magazines and pictorial interventions that settle like traces of a suspended time. The images constructed by the artist oscillate between figuration and conceptual tension, generating compositions in which the past and the present enter into a continuous dialogue. In these works, the recovery of materials and languages is not a nostalgic gesture, but a process of reactivating memory.
Through a painting style that alternates delicacy and critical tension, De Salve investigates a social dimension permeated by a subtle melancholy. The "Old" thus becomes living matter: an archive of authenticity capable of resisting the homogenization of the present and of opening spaces for reflection on possible cultural transformations. His works present themselves as places of passage through time, where fragments of stories and images resurface to suggest new readings of contemporaneity.
Life is made of small, surprising encounters: an old magazine found among the stalls of an antique fair
is a glimmer among the tangled thoughts of an artist who already knows what to do with it.
The exact moment of discovery evokes images that, combined through simple techniques,
force their way into the flow of everyday life.
From simplicity to experimentation — this is the journey the artist undertakes.
One can observe how, alongside discarded materials, she uses an unconventional support
for her compositions: mulberry paper. Colors and forms merge and blend with paper roads,
as if they were life and history, flowing in and out.
A need to intervene in the world in any way possible emerges — using and transforming fragments,
scraps of paper and any other material, collected and archived in the artistic mind.
Fictitious consumption, the oppressive silence, the culture industry, the inertia of an embrace, the metamorphosis of the sleepless: these are the themes explored by the artist. Art becomes a tool for social commentary; one finds oneself reflecting, even laughing — a bitter laugh.
"The dream is a factory where a vast multitude busies itself uselessly to continue making, unmaking, and remaking us.""The din of aquariums is an oppressive silence, a muteness matched by the inertia of a single embrace.
The attempt to emerge from those who follow the current.
I hold my breath as if I were at the bottom of the sea — to resurface, a single breath would suffice.
But at the end of the day, who am I? I am an unpopular eel in an aquarium of goldfish."
(Gloria De Salve)
"The metamorphosis of the sleepless is a state of the soul that reverberates socially,
in the condition of being suspended between dream and reality; metamorphosis is becoming
aware of oneself in order to build the springboard that will plunge us into life;
it is that change which, remaining locked in the soul, becomes a trap."
(Gloria De Salve)
