The Blue Stone series of paintings by Paolo Salvati. Ut pictura poesis

This volume analyzes and contextualizes the series of paintings Pietra blu (Blue Stone) by Paolo Salvati (1939-2014), made between 1973 and 2008. The birth of the pictorial subject is placed in the period following the Sixty-eight, when psychoanalysis was at its peak, center of a vast historical transformation. The attitude recognized in Paolo Salvati through the series of works Pietra blu is traced back to the trends of the chronological arc in which they are created. The volume identifies, in his Blue Stone paintings, the contribution of the Fauves teaching and, in general, of Expressionism, as well as the representation of reality as an expression or inner emanation, in the context of the evolution on the theme accomplished by Romanticism and by the Expressionism up to the contemporary. The critical reception of the series is analysed, in relation to the historical period in which the texts were written and the purposes for which they were created. The artist, with his paintings, characterized by a message of universal value, is placed within the debate of the time on the function of art and on the relationship between painting and poetry.