Biography

Salvatore Cantarella (Naples, 1935 - Rome, 2018) trained within the "Il Pro e Il Contro" group, a true linguistic laboratory where the intensity and dialogical complexity of positions confronted each other on the theme of history, recovering the function of painting as the "practice" of painting. The movement remains fundamental for understanding not only the history of Italian art but also very broad themes that were of great relevance until the 1970s and which involve the visual arts in general.

The central theme was the recovery of figurative painting. In fact, at a time when Informale dominated, the group proposed a new, non-academic figuration, capable of interpreting contemporary reality in an era that pushed towards abstraction, Pop art (Scuola di Piazza del Popolo), and later Arte Povera. The Roman nucleus was formed by Ugo Attardi, Ennio Calabria, Fernando Farulli, Alberto Gianquinto, Piero Guccione, Renzo Vespignani, and the critics Antonio Del Guercio, Dario Micacchi, and Duilio Morosini. In this context, Salvatore Cantarella took part in numerous group exhibitions at the gallery “Il Fante di Spade,” where the entire group exhibited in the early 1960s, and later at the galleries “La Feluca” and “La Nuova Pesa,” all in Rome.

In the early 1970s, he began his personal research that led him to paint peripheral urban spaces, constantly seeking a "light" to illuminate degraded contexts. This search for "Hopper-esque light" led the painter to work tirelessly in his studio, where he left more than a hundred works shown only to his closest inner circle of friends.