Interview with Salvatore Esposito
O-A: What is art to you? Is creating an urge, necessity or maybe an incontournable, essential way of life?
Salvatore Esposito: Art to me doesn’t even exist. Maybe this is not the right definition. Art is a medium to revive sensations, emotions and states of mind. It’s recreation of beauty, disgust or anger. You can like an artwork or don’t, you can comprehend it or not; but encountering an artwork in any case leaves you a sensation.
O-A: What wouldn’t you do without art? What did you discover, achieve with it?
Salvatore Esposito: Art is not a glass of water; it’s not indispensable, you can survive without it. You can live without it. I dare say that art is not an essential element to live. But at the same time you can find art in everything, in nature, in everything around you. So all and all even if a profession as artist didn’t exist as today, this kind of internal pleasure of spotting beauty and harmony is inseparable from human life.
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O-A: Who or what inspired you artistically; a person, artist, event, experience…
Salvatore Esposito: What most influenced me is Dadaism. I’d love to define myself as a post-Dadaism. The very first artist who actually shocked me with his artworks was Kurt Schwitters.There were objects of everyday life included in his works. That is the same that I try to do in my works. I believe any object that comes into your hands has an effect on your experience of life. Later I came across the works of Alberto Burri and to me was like finding my soul mate. I think Burri has surely influenced me with his way of using the material; the fact that he uses objects and deforms them for instance through burning was and still is an inspiration to me.
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O-A: What is a vivid memory of a remark concerning your art that got stuck with you?
Salvatore Esposito: I started quite late in 2004. I had two bottles of 1 litre gouache colour that were the kind of product adapted to children, bought years ago. My father used to construct furniture and he was disassembling a kind of library. So I had this big beautiful pieces of board and I started to through colour on them. The colours I had were yellow and red. I needed black at some point and I used VHS video tapes instead of using the actual black. I wasn’t thinking, it was all emotional; it was instinctive. Later on I started to use objects found during my walks in the city; most of these objects were left as trash outside of houses; they were unwanted items. The most insane part of the work was that after finishing and completing the work, I used to place the whole painting out beside the trash bin again and used to watch curiously to see if I can spot anyone who can note that very painting as a piece of art, regardless of the location it’s been exposed in; that meant practically exhibiting in the streets and not in the gallery.
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O-A: How do you search for inspiration and themes for your work?
Salvatore Esposito: I look around. It’s essential to me to mirror back the aspects of modern life and urban landscape in my works. We are living within these urban contexts; these objects and landscapes are inseparable parts of our current social life. So any object I see around can be a part of my work.
O-A: What names do you give your artworks?
Salvatore Esposito: Most of my works are actually entitled “Untitled”, because I believe anyone can see whatever he/she wants in an abstract art. Giving a title, you actually force
the viewer to search for a certain concept. The viewer should be able to spot the concept and gain an emotion without any command from the part of the artist.
Interview with Salvatore Esposito
