street in green Painting

SALVO MARIA RUTA, 49 years of age from Modica (Ragusa), Sicily, Italy, is an eclectic and creative artist. He proposes the art of savoir vivre in simplicity, that he expresses via works where nature has the upper hand. He studied architecture at the University of Palermo and is a self-taught artist and musician. Animated with artistic spirit since he was a boy, at 27 years of age he chose to express himself via painting and sculpture: his pictorial verve goes from complex expressive forms to forms of pure poetry, small groups of little houses that seem to enclose the simple life of transparent or secret people that cannot but be as such. He is artist in all senses, promoter of street events and artist of the sea with his fascinating sand sculptures constructed on the water’s edge, that the waves gradually destroy; artist’s work that, in being destroyed, becomes part of his most beloved element: water, the Mediterranean that laps the warm lands of Africa and the south of Europe. He is also a street artist, proposing musical cabarets throughout Italy in the summer months. A word from the critics: Gina Avogadro, journalist and art critic. White and black acrylics as echo of rock art, graffiti images alla Keith Haring, phosphorescent paintings of fire and water, ancient popular festive traditions, sandcastles joyously offered to the ebb of the tide, heart of a child: Salvo Maria Ruta, as he appears, resembles Emir Kusturica, the visionary and lucid wizard creator of “Underground”. It has indeed been said that Ruta Loves creating ephemeral sculptures on the shores of his native Modica, organizing street festivals and live musical cabarets in the summer months, painting here and there on papermill walls or any other surfaces that come to hand. But not a street artist and neither with his “black and whites” is he a graffiti artist in risk of “gentrification”. He is aboveall a total artist, simple and simply complex. His acrylic landscape, agglomerations of houses with smoking chimneys, small mysterious dwellings drowned in silence, speak of Pirandello. Other phosphorescent paintings of water and fire, landscapes crossed by flashes of sun, are powerfully insular, they vibrate with similitude like the pages of Verga and Camilleri. A bit Van Gogh and a bit Chagall (ah indeed….what true painter is not?!) a juggler of images, like Kusturica in all his artistic universe (cinema, music, etc.