Santolo Abbattista - The Reckless Movement

Surrealist aesthetics emerged around the 1920s and encompassed all fields of artistic research. Specifically, in the visual arts, Surrealism sought to explore the human subconscious and translate it into artwork through a mechanical writing process based on dream analysis. Consequently, Surrealist artworks propose the representation of a dreamlike dimension, completely dissociated from reality. However, this representation often relies on a hyperrealistic formal rendering, precisely to paradoxically accentuate the illusory and ambiguous nature of the surreal dimension.

As we can see from this work with its highly elaborate iconography, the artist Santolo Abbattista seeks to evoke a true vision, one steeped in fantasy and the grotesque. For this reason, drawing on the Surrealist tradition, his formal language is strongly figurative, evoking concrete images, even if they belong to a dimension other than that of the perceptible world. Indeed, the salient feature of this artist's Surrealism lies precisely in the power of his images, in the complexity of his compositions, which always present a wide variety of elements attributable to the purest associations driven by unconscious processes. However, to heighten the fantastical tones, Santolo Abbattista distorts this figurative concreteness with expressive distortions. Indeed, the visionary element is also accentuated by the highly elaborate composition, resulting in a pictorial style that does not undermine the concreteness of the images, yet still renders them vividly and dynamically. In short, compared to historical Surrealism and its hyperrealistic representational style, Abbattista prefers to stick to a more lively pictorial manner.

Santolo Abbattista was born on April 30, 1935, in Rome, where he still lives today. A pure self-taught artist, as the artist himself states, he has always dabbled in drawing and color since childhood, exploring themes of seascapes and landscapes until he discovered Surrealist painting. Santolo Abbattista is a painter whose work, somewhere between irony and reality, between evocative surrealism and precise figurative art, seeks to inspire people to rise above materiality and transport them to an "other" dimension of light and love.

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