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Salvatore Arancio

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Salvatore Arancio was featured in Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures 2008 at Bloomberg SPACE.

I am interested in how images and their meaning can be re-framed or re-viewed and used to suggest disquieting or evocative juxtapositions. I tend to play with symbols always aiming to retain a certain ambivalence in my work. Employing a number of different media, including photography, video, etchings and collage, my work explores the state of suspension between the real and the fictional through an emphasis on construction and staging.

One of my main interests is to challenge conventional ideas of beauty and sublime in nature and their relation with science. I'm interested in botany and geology and fascinated by the merging of myth and science in 19th century illustration, consequently I try to associate these notions with ideas of displacement and ambiguity.

In my ongoing series of etchings, I have focused on a type of imagery which was recurrent in the 19th century to illustrate geological studies and that later became scientifically outdated. I'm interested in twisting the original meaning of those images by digitally manipulating various found black and white etchings, creating several surreal and impossible landscapes. The scientific illustrations have been transformed into poetic and visionary interpretations of nature. The titles are originated from my archive of sentences collected from books on geology, which interest me because they already have a particular scientific but also evocative quality. They are intended to induce misunderstanding; there might be some reference to the images, but effectively there is not as they are just made up.

My sets of interests and concerns have also translated into the video trilogy entitled SKEEL, which comprises of three short animations. Loosely inspired by the violent volcanic eruption that took place in Mount Mazama (Oregon, USA) about 6,000 years ago, the animations were made by using found scientific 19th century black and white etchings of volcanic landscapes. The illustrations have been taken out of their original geological context to be digitally reprocessed in such a way to induce subjective reflections about destructive natural phenomena and past attempts of scientific description.

Lately I have developed a new series of collages where I juxtapose found geological illustrations of epic visual quality with modernist shapes. This new series aims to establish and question oppositions between order and chaos and to suggest a sense of human inefficacy against nature.

- Salvatore Arancio, 2010

http://federicaschiavo.com/Exhibitions/Salvatore-Arancio-Shasta

http://federicaschiavo.com/artists/salvatore-arancio

http://www.artfutures.org.uk/Artist/salvatore-arancio

• ARTfutures 2007

  7th March — 12th March 2007
  Bloomberg Space 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD

• ARTfutures 2008

  6th March — 12th March 2008
  Bloomberg Space 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD