The flesh is one of the world's potential languages because it interacts with the body. It speaks without thought, it bleeds, it is silent as it dismantles and remakes itself. In the work of Mario Salina it becomes an active 'feeling' that is rebuilt after being dismembered through painting, and each stage of dismemberment is an expressive moment.
The intense blue plan appears as a stain growing over a pale background and sprouting a complex of material marks.
The subject has disappeared to make way for a shattered gut-feeling that communicates its presence with great immediacy.
This sequence of works seems to be setting out on a new path with respect to the enamels on canvas which, in a painterly manner, left deeply-toned chairs in waiting for the thought and existential pose of a body. The eye is concentrated on an interior that seems to allude to its original material through the motionless dismemberment of movement.
So a unity, a penetration, is born, one that tests the as yet unformed possibilities of colour to become a biology, a living language that shoots through it like aesthetic lightening. The viewer experiences this unity as a vibration resulting from his naked encounter with it, even where the thickly-painted representation seems to slide towards a tonal essence typified by the darkest umbra, colourless fragments, harmonic contrasts with the background.
I spoke to Mario Salina for just a few moments in a laboratory.
Now that I leaf through the images of his work I become aware of its name: it is made of sweet sodium, a wise tempering for an artist.
April 2001, Alberto Mori