Storytelling (2014)

Storytelling
Beers London, London, UK
7 Oct. – 22 Nov. 2014

Storytelling sees Salgado further defining his voice, and proving the young artist is wildly imaginative, eager to challenge himself, and keen to evolve with each successive exhibition.

Most notable is how tightly-cropped faces have given way to allow for full figures to move freely within the painted space. It is a confidence that arises in both form, concept, and content. His colour story is more somber, mostly limited to grey, brown, green, and blue, but maintains his tendency for loudness alongside a delicate attention to coloration particularly in relation to the varied tonalities of skin.

‘Bruce’s Vision’ was a starting point and metonym for the entire body of work. The painting is based on a photograph taken by a man who was legally blind, then paratially regained sight and came out as a gay man. The show tells of reawakening, fantasy, darkness and light. Here, he is imagined as a blind pauper who leads the viewer throughout the fantasy, into the metaphorical forest, a host of characters worthy of a storybook fairytale.

‘Vanishing Point’, arguably the artist’s most conceptual artwork to date, references Masaccio’s famous Tribute Money fresco in Florence, in which the artist was accredited with inventing perspectival painting in two dimensional imagery in the early 15th century, and mimics (even pokes fun at) the institutional preservation of fresco paintings for modern viewing. Never before has Salgado’s studio and his physical relationship to his work and practice formed such a pivotal foundation for the execution of a painting.

Oscar Wilde once so famously stated, “The [painted subject] is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.” The real story here is of a young painter gaining confidence in himself and his craft, like Oz working behind the veil, weaving a story greater than the sum of its parts.