[fullwidth background_color=”#ffffff” background_image=”” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_webm=”” video_mp4=”” video_ogv=”” video_preview_image=”” overlay_color=”” overlay_opacity=”0.5″ video_mute=”yes” video_loop=”yes” fade=”no” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”20px” padding_bottom=”20px” padding_left=”20px” padding_right=”20px” hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” menu_anchor=”” class=”” id=””][fusion_text]By Flavia Musciacco
Sharp stones, chipped with a few vigorous and courageous blows, stacked on top of each other patiently, in an unstable balance, to form a column on which stands a form polished with loving care, representing life. A new world. It is the “pillar of life,” the work that Salvatore Sava, a sculptor from Salento, exhibitions throughout Europe, designed for the “Peace Envoy” award, the prize that the Forum of Mediterranean Women Journalists gives to women journalists “Sent to hot spots of social, political, religious, environmental conflicts.”
War envoys? No, peace witnesses. The message is all encapsulated there in that work, which represents the patient and daily work that women journalists do in the territories, guarding and defending the values of Democracy, therefore Peace.
Stone by stone, day by day, to tear down all the walls, and build the foundations of new worlds.
Even today, after more than 30 years of exhibitions, catalogs, reviews, and the market, sculptor Salvatore Sava appears as a fascinating mystery in the making, identified with extraordinary foresight by Luciano Caramel, one of Italy’s most prestigious art critics, more than 20 years ago.
CHILDHOOD.
His works are messages that start from a strong idea but promise endless outcomes: archaic and futuristic at the same time.
Yes, because in order to try to understand the path of this artist’s talent, it is useful to start with a small episode from his childhood when, at the age of six, on the eve of his first Christmas vacations, he came across a sack full of clay that was to be used for a construction site not far from home, in Surbo, the town on the outskirts of Lecce where he was born, lives, and works (in the workshop and in the fields). He asked and got a bag of them, and throughout the day and part of the night, he made the main puppets of a Nativity scene that he brought triumphantly to school the next day, into the hands of the teacher, Mrs. Lidia. Who, very proudly, made the rounds of the other classes with this trophy and the baby attached to her dress.
That story has not stopped since. Indeed, the nativities followed one another over time until the stylized one he dedicated to Gualtiero Marchesi in 2008.
Salvatore discovered paper, wood, plastic, iron, but also tuff, mortar, sand.
Stone, finally, a love almost as great as his love for Patrizia, the lifelong girlfriend who will become his wife.
High school studies could only have an artistic orientation, and there is an excellent high school in Lecce. He graduated with honors, developing some subjects such as architecture, but also ornamentation, figure, and modeling. And he learned the techniques he experimented with at home, in a wing carved out of his country house. The next step, needless to say, was the Academy of Fine Arts, which as soon as he graduated asked him to stay on, first as an adjunct then on the permanent staff after the ritual competition.
At 17, the first exhibition. He asked a fairly well-established painter from Surbo, Valeriano Mele, how he should act in the fortunate event that someone asked him for the price of one of his quads. “Consider how much a craftsman makes,” Mele advised him, “add frame and material you bought and make the price. Only on the last day, when the artists were loading their paintings, a visitor approached Sava and asked him the price of a painting: 150,000, the boy shot. That one took out the money, had the work wrapped and left.
THE SUCCESS.
The turning point in his trajectory occurred in 1996 with the exhibition “La magica Luna” (The Magic Moon), which took place simultaneously in four settings, one more evocative than the other: the Abbey of Santa Maria di Cerrate, the Ducal Palace of San Cesario, Piazza San’Oronzo and the Castle of Charles V in Lecce. The catalog, signed by a very brave Caramel for an almost unknown artist, was a resounding success. That has not stopped since. And the iridescent magic of the moon will forever mark the sculptor’s poetics.
Since then, alternating between painting and teaching, agriculture and sculpture, Sava’s life has been a succession of experiments, exhibitions, commissions, even international ones, awards, impressive installations, and prestigious reviews.Sava’s stone is now a point of no return in the history of contemporary Italian sculpture. www.musma.it/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id
Sava’s work today, after a long intimate and autobiographical period, has moved toward social engagement and denunciation of the distorted and violent relationship between man and nature.
Shy and unassuming to the point of shyness, the Salento artist encapsulates the best of these people’s character traits: it is as if he wants to shy away from the obligations of promoting himself. Already very successful and about to make new artistic ventures, in an interview with a weekly magazine in 2001, when asked if he had any regrets, he replied, “I would have liked to have been even closer to my parents in the work of the fields, even though they never made it a burden on me.”[/fusion_text][/fullwidth]
