Antropomorfia – lo stretto legame tra natura e l'uomo – an exhibition now on in Barga Vecchia at the Galleria Comunale until the 19th August. The exhibition represents two years work by the artist Nicola Salotti and includes oil paintings on canvas and wood and a limited edition of prints. Based around Greek mythology, with particular reference to Narcissus, the work does not "shout" at you, it does not have that immediate impact that some artists strive for but do not be fooled by the apparent quietness of the images – give them some time and you will find that most of them have a powerful voice that whispers into your head.
Barga is known as "art city" and it should be proud of artists like Nicola who has consistently shown great progress and movement in his work over the last 4 – 5 years.
Look out for a couple of small paintings from the area around Lago Santo and spend some time with the trees in the background of the large Narciccus painting in the main gallery – could it be that Nicola has been studying fractals ?
In colloquial usage, a fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole".[1] The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured". source