Salvatore Magno biography
the painter and contemporary artist.

The luke artist Salvatore Magno is born on the 17th of may 1959 in a little town in the south of Italy.

The luke  territory (Basilicata) offers to the young boy the earliest ideas of thought and expression: nature, history, society, popular culture.

Even at an early age, a lucky epiphany reveals the beginning of his artistic career, as the artist himself explains:

“There was a small supermarket in my hometown.
Every day after school, it was my habit to go watch some items for sale.
I well remember that picture: there were colors on a shelf, I remained a few minutes to observe, I imagined them but I could not afford to buy them.
One day after a few months, the girl in the supermarket, moved by my humble perseverance,  decided to give me those colors. “

From that day on, the color reveals the young man his own voice of expression: visual art.
The author tests himself with different kinds of art: sculpture, painting, graphics, photography; in painting he finds his  shelter in the storm, always at the mercy of a tumultuous serenity.
In 1978 he holds his first exhibition in Policoro, a small town of the luke region, in which day by day in the years to come, the reputation of the artist has born and grown.
Years of change follow: life leads him to Milan in the early ’80s. Here it is recognized the value of his artistic expression with the achievement of some important national and international awards, including the “Washington Award” at the gallery “La Bitta” in Milan. A lively artistic presence in the Milan area triggers the interest of some local and national dealers to encourage the artist to spread his art.
Work of different nature are commissioned: the artist furnishes hotels, restaurants and pubs.
He returned to his beloved and terrible South; here he finds  in an old mill an ideal space to set up his first “work” studio . Only  few years later, the artist gets a workspace at the baronial castle of Policoro where he creates a vast artistic production. He produces public works that let him to remain present at the Basilicata region and its province.
The artist tests himself diving into the metaphysical, refining more and more the oil technique.
Frequent topic of his art is the Magna Grecia (Great Greece); the artist is fascinated by the history of the former Greek colonies: Siris and Heraclea, whose  relics of vase painting are present in Policoro.
In the years , he experiences different art techniques and themes by making the art as the most natural  amplifier of a socio-cultural but also intimate music, otherwise dormant.

In ’93 experience contemporary art.
In  2011 some of the most vivid paintings of the artist are chosen and used  for  the script of the italian movie “Operazione Vacanze”  by Claudio Fragasso with Jerry Calà and Valeria Marini. Some scenes in the movie are then enriched with contemporary works labeled “Magno 2011″.

The artist now lives and produces in Bologna (Bo). Landed to contemporary art, he relativizes absolute concepts of life, he undermines the base and reassembles preconceptions of society, he shakes the tenets of behavior dictated by an increasingly consumerist and ephemeral culture.
Salvatore Magno lives through his art continuous emotional paradoxes that make his paintings  a poetry rich of oxymorons and allegories.
The bright colors of the latest productions, scream the viewer to listen to them and to take an active part in the process of the human and artistic sharing.
The artist does not aim to teach, comment; his works walk alone, feeding exclusively of the ego of the artist translated to the artist himself and to the outside world, then the representations  are intimate visions that on  fertile soil, fecundate overall personal visions.
At the end of the works, it is often the use of jets of color designed to “smudge” an otherwise perfect reality, revealing its more truthful imperfect nature.