Pilar Saltini was born in Milan in 1971. She graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan in 1989 before moing to paris where she studied at the Paris in the 1990’s where she studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts under Pierre Carron, Leonardo Cremonini and Vladimir Velickovic. She subsequently worked as assistant to the Italian artist Valerio Adami. In 1999 she won the first prize of the prestigious "Grand Prix du portrait Louis Weller" of the French Academy of Art. In 2011 she exhibited her work in the Italian pavillion of the 54th Venice Biennale.
Her pictorial references are the works of Edgar Degas, Joaquin Sorolla, Cecily Brown, Leonardo Cremonini and Vingenzo Gemito. In her painting Saltini searches for her forms in her memory, dreams and imagination. The souvenir of a bed sheet becomes in her canvas a mountain, the vision of an agave on the beach evokes in her mind the witness to a secret love, the peaceful light of a sunset the beginning of a wildfire. The artist seeks through her work to make us lose our bearings with reality by creating painted worlds in which dream, ambiguity and an undercurrent of menace interweave – a painting which does not describe reality but rather suggests, evokes and leads us towards secretive and poetic territories.
Education :
1995 Diplômée « Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts » Paris, France.
1989 Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, Italy.
website : www.pilarsaltini.com