Artist Salvatore Arancio shows for the third time at Federica Schiavo Gallery, with a solo exhibition entitled And These Crystals Are Just like Globes of Light.
The artist lives and works in London, where he received his MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art.
The display of the first room revolves around a sculptural installation designed and produced by the artist for the Kunsthalle Winterthur in 2016. The leitmotif for this part of the exhibition is the fictional reading of the Cave of Giant Crystals (Cueva de los Cristales), the caverns located below the Naica Mine in Mexico, where there are the biggest natural crystals known on Earth. The cave inspired Arancio to an installation of individual ceramic works arranged on black resin surfaces and titled And These Crystals Are Just like Globes of Light
While the Cave Of Giant Crystals became the source of inspiration for the works in the first room, in the next one the sculptural pieces are shaped by forms informed by the petrified trees of the “Lava Trees State Park” in the Hawaii Island, that preserves lava moulds of the tree trunks that were formed after a volcanic eruption in 1790. The sculptures in the second room have been produced in 2017 in collaboration with the ancient Ceramica Gatti in Faenza together with the project for La Biennale di Venezia 2017.
In all the sculptures in the show, Arancio doesn’t hesitate to convene science and make apparent their mystical side decontextualizing the forms that have inspired him and emphasize the strangeness and the evocative power of these natural elements that may recall phallic symbols and esoteric signs.