LOVE SHINES SO BRIGHT (LUZ Nº 1)

Oil, Natural pigments and acrylic resin on canvas

80 cm

POP, MEDUSA Y SETAS AZULES

Oil on canvas

36 x 28 cm

F

or decades, Salustiano has developed one of the most distinctive visual languages in contemporary Spanish figurative painting. His figures emerge against immaculate fields of color with an almost ceremonial presence. Stripped of conventional narrative, they inhabit a space where time appears suspended and beauty is conceived not as ornament, but as an absolute.

Salustiano has defined this territory as “hyper-idealism”: the pursuit of an image purified of circumstance, imperfection, and the noise of time. Yet an artistic language remains alive only when it is capable of questioning the very principles that made it recognizable.

His recent work marks precisely such a moment.

The figures remain unmistakably his, but the world they inhabit is changing. In Love is Pop and the works surrounding it, the solemnity of the ideal gives way to something more improbable, playful, and emotionally open. Flowers, marine creatures, and unexpected objects enter the pictorial field, transforming not only the composition, but the reality these figures inhabit.

What emerges is the territory of dreams.

For Salustiano, this territory has a precise origin: childhood. Not understood simply as an earlier stage of life or an exercise in nostalgia, but almost as a physical place. A protected space to which the imagination can return. His characters appear like figures drawn from a storybook. They inhabit a world where reality, fantasy, and memory have not yet learned to remain separate. Here, the improbable requires no explanation. Scale, symbols, and associations respond to an emotional rather than a rational order.

– Will Yaya –
Editor

www.salustiano.com

@salustiano.co