Biographical Note
Antonio Saliola was born in Bologna, on September 28, 1939. Due to the war, he spent the first years of his life in the countryside where he had been evacuated with his family, and where he was raised in a typically rustic environment. The country kitchen, the open fields, the vegetable garden, the barnyard and the animals.
After primary school he returned to Bologna to start out on a somewhat tormented schooling, torn between hostility towards some of his subjects and his obvious passion for art – paintings, books, cinema. The family spent their summer holidays in a small mountain village in the Valsugana where his mother had taught school. Painting was certainly his vocation and his parents gave him every opportunity to express himself, the sole condition being that he finish his studies and acquire the all important “piece of paper”. Antonio obeyed, completed his classical studies and enrolled in the Faculty of Law, taking his degree (not without considerable effort) in 1967. He then won a competition to become an official at Bologna’s Academy of Fine Arts. During this period, he opened the Tempo Art Gallery where he organized a number of important figurative art exhibitions until 1974, when the gallery closed its doors. At this point he resigned from the Academy and finally, devoted himself entirely to painting.
Saliola spent long summer holidays in Romagna, inland from Rimini, at a house called “Cagnotta”. After 1972, he held a series of one-man shows, with presentations by Luigi Carluccio. These were all paintings of posed groups, mainly families with animal faces inserted among the humans.
His work not only aroused the interest of critics and personalities of the art world, but also the writers and scholars and film directors who joined him in projects resulting from their richly creative friendship.
Saliola never lost his love for books and cinema (as a boy he carefully copied into huge volumes, criticisms of every film he saw) and this helped him to become a narrative painter, relating his own life experience in a succession of picture cycles: family portraits (1970-1973); courtyards and taverns (1973-1974); the boy who wanted to fly (1974); school and college (1973-1974); the West (1976); ideal visits to his adored Claude Monet (1987-1988); and great italian-style gardens (1987-1989).
Over the last few years he has made a pictorial journey – half reality, half dream – through country gardens and houses where the figures, his favourite figures, are children, animals and angels at play, to create an ideal evocation of the years o childhood.
Antonio Saliola still lives in Bologna and now spends his summers in the Marecchia Valley, in the medieval village of Petrella Guidi where he has been working with friends to resurrect the Borgo del Sole e della Luna’