BLACK & WHITE AND RED SNAKES
“A 24 hour showcase of Giorgio Di Salvo’s entire production of illustration of the last two years.
Giorgio Di Salvo showcased for the first time his entire production of illustration of the last two years. He does it in occasion of Tied Together, a Nike and (Red) joint initiative involving Milan together with Tokyo, London, New York, Berlin and Paris, with each city hosting 144 global hours of running with the goal of fighting the spread of Aids in the African continent.
The artist also designed an illustration for the local team of Tied Together, clearly inspired to Milan’s history, which will also serve as the logo for the local Stadium running team.”

“Drawing and illustration are only two of the many techniques which make up Giorgio Di Salvo’s body of work. They are methods that he has used continuously throughout his career. This exhibition hopes to be a true retrospective of this chapter of Di Salvo’s practice.
Presented are the last 24 months of work, a creative path in which, at every step forward, he changed techniques, subjects, samples and inspirations, while managing to keep its stylistic and aesthetic coherence intact.
Starting from the first works depicting primarily skulls, joined shortly after by voodoo and African subjects, until the most recent exploration of female body and all its possible perversions and extremes, there remains a visual element that connects it all: the exclusive use of black and white.
This elementary chromatic contrast - using everything from airbrush to henna, brush pen to charcoal - aids the artist to depict all of the different worlds he wants to explore. It becomes a sort of iconography of the sacred and the mystic at their most primordial, a graphic and symbolic representation of dark vision of the relationship between humankind and its own end (whether taken as individual death or apocalyptic catastrophe), between humankind and nature, between humankind and spirituality. Taken all together, the group gives us a look into Di Salvo’s ultra-dark view of the cyclical nature of humankind, arriving practically at a hypothesis of a post-catastrophic future that is cyber, yet primitive and reminds us - through its use of symbols, iconography and rituals - of our most remote past.
Seemingly, the collection suggests, it could all end where it first began: Africa.”

Text by Federico Sarica