EXPO: ZAGREB – BELGRADE, METAPHORICAL GREETING TO THE BIRTH OF EUROPE – WORK IN PROGRESS

  • Location: Belgrade City Museum, Resavska 40b
  • Date: April 3–13, 2017
  • Organisation:

    Marc Pio Maximilen Salvelli and the author

  • Impressum:

    Gile Fragile: technical production

At the peculiar historical and social moment when the concept of the integration of countries into the European Union is seen by some as utterly futile and by others as indisputably necessary, sound and logical, the Croatian-French-Italian artist Marc Pio Maximilien Salvelli is presented to Belgrade’s cultural audience through his large series of works entitled the Metaphorical Greeting of the Birth of Europe – Work in Progress. It is a comprehensive and layered artistic concept, started already in 1993. Before the Belgrade exhibition, it was displayed in Paris, Madrid, Rome, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo and other European cities.

Inspired by the fact that biologically, biographically and culturally he belongs to different cultural circles of Europe, the artist combines what is separated by the geographical distance. At the same time, he shows the realistic, as much as romantic concept of uniting the European cultural circle and the somewhat spiritually eroded ‘Old Europe’, seeking to restore within the idea of European integration, at all levels of everyday life, the topics and motifs that constitute our cultural and artistic identity. Each European capital painted by Marc Pio Maximilien Salvelli, has its own distinctive shape, with several important urbanistic and architectural monuments and vistas that make it unique forever on the map of European immovable cultural heritage. However, a European city does not consist only of the (dead) monuments, buildings, streets and boulevards. It is composed of its inhabitants, the joy of everyday life and movement in this peculiar area. Therefore, in this new addition and extension of his work, the artist includes the motifs of people, women’s faces that symbolically transmit the smile of a city and the individual charm of everyday life...

Salvelli shows that the doors of European culture are not only open, but that we are all an integral part of this large and complex historical and cultural unit.

Marc Pio Maximilien Salvelli was born in 1970 in Paris. He attended the Art School in Munich. He arrived in Zagreb in 1984, where he enrolled in the painting course at the School of Applied Arts. He studied painting and mosaic at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris and the Berlin Academy of Film and Television. His first one-artist exhibitions were held in Athens, Rome and Paris. He is a member of the Associations of Fine Artists in France, Germany and Croatia.