The Salon

The Salon is a large oil and acrylic on canvas measuring two meters by 140 centimetres. It is part of the Misplaced series, i.e. the works in which Angelo Accardi displaces the viewer by inserting elements out of context into human environments such as living rooms, museums or urban panoramas. The painting is set in an elegant bourgeois interior, the style recalls the large Hausmanian apartments in the center of Paris. A group of gentlemen in noble clothes are gathered around the fireplace. There are those who sleep and those who converse. Apparently it could seem like any other after lunch with the men busy sipping bitters in the living room and, we imagine, the women in the other room. The first breaking element is the presence of an enormous ostrich which, as if nothing had happened, admires the painting hanging above the fireplace. As much as the ostrich is captured in its own vitality, as human beings seem lifeless, almost as if they were a painting within a painting or, in any case, corollaries. The other, more hidden, breaking element is the subject of the work above the fireplace, an abstract work by Ian Davenport, an artist of our times and therefore of another era compared to the furnishings and clothes of the subjects. A temporal pastiche which, combined with the presence of the ostrich, shocks the viewer, leaving him with great curiosity. Or anguish, depending on your sensitivity. Like all the artist's works, the Salon is also the result of long and painstaking work. Before painting, Accardi creates a scheme with photographs and graphics programs, to study the exact position of out-of-context elements in the painting. Then he transfers everything onto canvas, by hand, using oils and acrylics. The union of the two techniques gives a sense of thickness and depth combined with a patina of times gone by which heightens the surreal sensation.