by Daniela Palazzoli
The basis of Lucio Salvatore's artistic thinking is the belief that the world today tends to compress more and more the spaces where individuals can act freely in order to develop their personality to fulfill their destiny.
He chose a fluid, our blood to irrefutably testify the necessity for every human being to return to his own being:
To Salvatore blood is the perfect element to create the portraits that he creates by spreading it on transparent Plexiglas.
Blood that people have donated previously, is used to create the artworks, and combines perfectly the physicality with the essence of people portrayed.
As Salvatore takes blood from its models for the creation of the portraits, he has been labeled, with the most obvious association: Salvatore/artist = vampire.
In recent decades we have been bombarded by vampires, in literature and in all kind of media.
The popularity of the vampire depends on two very strong appeals that can be resumed in the fear of death and in a diffused perverted relationship with sexuality.
Less explicable is the flood of recent literature about this subject, that can't be fully explained as a phenomenon of mass Gothicism fashion.
In whatever representation, the vampire is a bloodsucker of other human beings whom he tries to drag into his destiny in order to feed the circuit of fake existence.
The current success of the vampire could be explained by the fact that it is a metaphor that explains very well the unsatisfactory aspects of the sociocultural situation that we are experiencing today.
“The fate of those who live in our late-consumerism society is the fate of the vampirized” L.S.
Consumerism has led and continues to propel towards identification of the good life and well-being with everything that is “other-from-us”:
The conquest of goods, the identification with successful models and styles that once had their own historical reason to be, now survive only as a rough draft of stereotypes that have lost their validity and human sense.
Along with an obsession for erotic material that cannot be more massive, especially false is the idea of beauty that comes from a spectacularity disconnected from any idea of quality.
The embrace of the vampire brings both him and his victims into a fake world, where it's not possible to freely exist and build an authentic life and future.
Vampires can't give or create, they can only steal and lead to a fake life and It is not a coincidence that In Vampires traditional iconography, their sucker's mouth and fangs prevails upon Blood.
When I saw for the first time Lucio Salvatore series of works One Blood my lips naturally whispered the word antidote.
By using Blood as an authentic reality and as a metaphor for the principle of identity Salvatore becomes a character never staged before: the artist as the ANTI-VAMPIRE.
Through the use of blood Salvatore celebrates the individuality of its subjects/models, “against the conforming forces of the system that tends to Vampirize people's freedom” L.S.
Lucio develops a constructive process of portraying, which transforms simple materials in essences with intense life of their own.
In these portraits, people that have been chosen are not unaware individuals, bitten and sucked by beings living a false-existence.
They are individuals who are willing and proud to express themselves so fully by using their most valuable element and so essentially with their bloodstream, to want to share it in a total and immediate dialogue with the artist and us.
Lucio chose blood because it has structural characteristics similar to all human beings, but at the same time provides for each of them a very accurate reading of their specific essence.
What has fascinated Lucio was the power of blood to “synthetize the tension between the immanence of its physical uniqueness and the transcendence in the universal coexistence of all human beings” L.S.
Lucio Salvatore is not the first artist to use blood as a vehicle and instrument for his art.
What makes it unique is the flashing intuition that this fluid, essential to the functioning of our body, is an irrefutable witness of the uniqueness of each human being.
This has been done much more deeply but formally very similarly to the famous fingerprints( and this is not a mere coincidence) that has been used by another inteligent artist, Piero Manzoni, as a metaphor for the oneness of each human being.
The use of blood has a lot to do with those artistic movements that have been stored under the name of body art.
Regina Galindo and Marina Abramovich, for example, have used elements of the human body to express and highlight both forms of cohercision and oppression exercised by society towards individuals and to claim the right to freedom for everyone to be beyond the stereotypes commonly accepted by the system.
Hermann Nitsch performed orgiastic rituals in which blood, even if used only for its red color, assumed an important evocative role.
You might think that Marc Quinn's work is closer to the poetic of Lucio Salvatore, since the English artist used the blood to create a self-portrait too.
In reality he did the opposite of what Salvatore did: he froze the blood, symbolically canceling its nature of vital fluid, carrier of life and complexity, to use it as any other type of plastic material that a sculptor normally uses.
Lucio Salvatore instead writes with the blood of its models, his inspiring partners, the outline of their faces, parts of their bodies, and even simple references of visual elements that allow him to capture the unique expression of their personalities' traits.
The question of identity becomes recently more and more important to Salvatore's work, in a pattern that is directly proportional to the diffusion of social networks on the internet.
The Internet has changed our relationship with media, offering greater opportunities of becoming builders of the knowledge that interests us, far more than the passive traditional media like television.
But Lucio Salvatore is more sensitive to the fact that "the Internet created a virtual society where the dematerialization of individuality, the possibility of easily shaping brand new identities, give us the illusion of being able to easily become whoever we wish to be.
Google, Wikipedia - the new encyclopedias - social networks certify this information and rapidly give us the approval and public recognition for our new selves that become our references.
We look-at-ourselves instead of being ourselves – we are in the way of being-seen from outside. This is contemporary man's way to be” LS.
In conclusion Salvatore's portraits, sketched with the blood of its models, become the antidotes to the escape from ourselves, and blood is the proven proof of our lives authenticy.
Lucio Salvatore, the anti-vampire, enters in the contemporary world as an artist capable to use blood to celebrate life, to interpret and reshape it to enrich each person portrayed existence.
