Defining Andrea Saltarelli’s painting as “symbolic” means attributing this same representative function to the figures populating his world, defined by the artist as “antropogrittici”. In other words, a relationship is established between the object and the mental image it evokes. The curious creatures depicted by Saltarelli are much more than the result of an imaginative ingenuity that delights in inventing something that was not there before. Their stylized shapes, monolithic-like bodies, and large heads without eyes but with pronounced lips and noses evoke an archetypal, primordial dimension that transcends the playful, jocular tone outwardly suggested by the images. They are idols of a lost era, gods of a forgotten land. As such, they embody fears, dreams, instincts, and generally, everything related to an intuitive – “noetic”, in philosophical terms – understanding of reality and things. They speak the same language as petroglyphs. They are, therefore, a code impossible to define or understand entirely as it refers to a magical-ritual conception of the image, to a phase of world history governed, in the human imagination, by both occult powers and mythical, natural, and supernatural forces. An aura of sacredness emanates from these figures, whose appearance has very little of the human and, instead, is more similar to that of the ancient dolmens, with square, curved, or pointed lines, esoteric symbols – think of the eye seen in some paintings, references to the stars and other signs attributable to divinity. Moreover, supposing it is true that “gods fall”, like any other archetype, when attempting to rationally interpret it, it is then convenient to approach these paintings and the deities portrayed in them in the same way as one does with dreams – with the attitude of those who do not try to “understand” absolutely, but rather to “feel” something moving in the depths, an ancient voice speaking to us from the mists of time to bring us back to the world’s dawning before the advent of civilization.
[Daniela Pronesti']