Antonio Saladino

May 19, 2019

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Ceramist, sculptor and painter, Antonio Saladino lives and works in Lamezia Terme, where he was born in 1950.

Antonio Saladino Viaggio orizzontale Ceramica

Having graduated in Ceramic art at the State Institute of Art in Vibo Valentia, he attended the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Reggio Calabria. As a founding member of the Lamezia Archaeological Association and subsequently of “Magazzini Voltaire” (1986) as well as of the “Angelo Savelli Artecontemporanea” Center in Lamezia Terme (1993), he has contributed to preserving the fragile historical fabric and memorial structure of his territory, as well as producing and promoting events which brought him into contact with regional and national artistic realities.
He has collaborated, as a designer, with the Archaeological Superintendence of Calabria, for which he has created precious works of historical reconstruction of ancient ceramic artefacts. In the evolution of his creative work, the 70s and 80s constitute a fertile season of research and experimentation suspended between painting and sculpture, with an attentive eye to all the linguistic elements offered by the artistic panorama of the moment, that was in full innovative ferment.
Around 1990 he began to take an almost exclusive interest in ceramic sculpture. During these years he met and befriended Angelo Savelli, an exchange that contributed positively to Saladino’s artistic growth. In fact, he matured and experimented with new modes of expression and ways of working, researching lightness of matter through ceramics while fully developing the strong spiritual component already inherent in his sculptural work.

In this same period he definitively turns to the use of white clay, which assimilates and combines the humble material connotation of the artefact with the aesthetic grandeur of statuary marble. At the same time, the archaeological findings in the regional territory - sculptural fragments and headless and armless statues brought to light in some excavations - were to stimulate the artist’s concept of simulated artefact, to which he bestows the identity of a work through his own sensitivity and syntax of thought and that contemporary language, in a continuous exchange of roles between creative imagination, art and historical memory. His works can be found in private and public collections in Italy and abroad. The Civic Museum of Taverna has dedicated a permanent exhibition space to his work.

A word from the author
«My work “horizontal journey”, portrayed on the cover of this issue amidst packing materials - in this case wood and plastic - might seem a little out of place, almost lost. And yet, from a more careful observation, the relationship that is created between the objects reveals a certain coherence to my underlying spirit, because in some ways it brings out the link between art and the world of packaging... Artwork, in order to be enjoyed by the masses, is in fact always underway, for shows and exhibitions and it could be said that there is no work of art that has not had, during its history, its own packaging, to underline the close and indissoluble union between the one and the other.
Hence I see my collaboration with ItaliaImballaggio as both successful and pertinent. (Antonio Saladino, April 2019).