Lillo Sauto - Sogno Andaluso

The artwork is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Artist's biography


Lillo Sauto is a Sicilian abstract painter, born in Butera in 1978. After a university period in Florence, he has been living for many years now permanently in Rome. Self-taught, from a very young age he approaches the world of art, initially using drawing as a mode of expression, later arriving in adulthood at painting, which he indeed recognizes as a preexisting inhabitant of his sensitive soul. From the first works (Agitation of a Sunset and Dancers, both from 2015), painted during long sleepless hours in which the canvas can be abandoned only once the work is finished, emerges clearly a fact that characterizes the artist: his style with a fully original stroke, born from the inner urge to express himself in absolute freedom, obeying feeling rather than rationality. This aspect naturally aligns him with an artist like Van Gogh, one of his inspirations.
The message of Sauto undoubtedly carries a universality that transcends national borders. It can be grasped and interiorized by anyone, in keeping with their own temperament. He paints like a modern sailor who commands the fury of his emotional elements through canvas and brush. Instead of ink on paper, he draws circles infused with passion and feelings. In his paintings one finds love and anger, passion as well as disappointment. Not identifying with the paradigm of figurative language, he instead chooses to invent his own. The circles flow like sea foam, carrying the urgency and effervescence of the wave, which is also represented in paintings such as I’m Not a Surfer (Non sono un surfista) from 2016. In conveying on canvas the experience of self, the flow is far from slow and placid; rather, art and message erupt like lava from the brush. Sauto chooses acrylic because it allows him to perceive the object in the painting as finished immediately; rationality does not need to parcel out language through the filter of time, and this does not prevent the artist from spreading harmony. If it were music, we would hear in the ears the sound of a brilliant rhapsody. Interest in Sauto’s work begins to cross national borders. In 2017 some paintings were exhibited in Barcelona during the group show Exposiciónde Arte at Crisolart Galleries. He is particularly appreciated for his stylistic code, which remains original and coherent and makes him recognizable, without slipping into self-imitations or being confined by the rational limits of thought. Each painting is complete only when even the last sigh of enthusiasm finds its pictorial allocation.

To complete the recognition among the most notable contemporary Sicilian painters, in 2022 the artist’s inclusion in the Atlas of Contemporary Art 2021, published by De Agostini, takes place. We can cite as the prevailing motivation that “his poetics does not yield to the interferences of sensible reality, but rather turns exclusively to the pictorial manifestation of his intrinsic intimacy, endowing form and pigment to the most recondite gratifications of his soul.”

Themes

The artist seems to assign to his paintings the task of communicating the emotions that inhabit him, where he feels defenseless and unable, perhaps because of geographic birth or inclination, to let the medium naturally suited to doing so—the word—take on this role. Some of them return his heart to the beloved homeland (Sicily, the mood of 2017 or Sciatu mio of 2019), from where it seems the child Lillo never truly left. For the one who paints each painting, who trembles to convey to the canvas his own feelings, it is that child who dwells in the painter and never abandons him, to the point of sometimes suggesting a chromaticism almost childlike.

Techniques

A distinctive trait of his production is the dense set of compositions formed by a complex weave of spherical figures that recall the circle understood as a cornerstone of Kandinsky's work, attributed in particular to the period following his Bauhaus experiences, which occurred in the 1920s. Following the theories of the Moscow-based observer in the reception of chromatic choices, however, one must not neglect, in the present artist's work, the psychoanalytic aspects. The colors of the palette, according to their belonging to warm or cold tonalities, can be juxtaposed with sounds and natural elements, aimed at triggering certain “sensory resonances” in visual perception. The overpowering force of yellows, with aureate nuances, initially evokes the sun but also the golden backgrounds of Viennese Gustav Klimt, an artist with whom Sauto shares the meticulously constructed compositional framework of circles and spiraling figures, comparable to the decorative apparatus of the famous Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907. Yet it is in the use of blues that the Sicilian artist proves able to catapult the observer into an astral plane of overwhelming communicative energy. Drawing inspiration from the marvelous shores of his homeland, the bluish shades lead man toward infinity with a deep, cold color capable of developing the element of quiet.

The abstract semiotics of Lillo Sauto reflects a willful and passionate temperament, a love of life with motions almost childlike translated into visionary painting, which, starting from the sensible world, decisively shifts toward the fantastic, placing real objects in a dimension with hyperuranic resonances.
[Atlas of Contemporary Art 2021, De Agostini Edition]

Personal exhibitions
- 2016 solo show at the Circolo degli Ufficiali della Marina Militare in Rome

- 2016 Solo exhibition for the Community of Sant'Egidio, at Centro Eschilo Casal Palocco, Rome

- 2016 solo exhibition at Project, Rome

- 2017 “Fridy Music and Visual Art” solo show at Impact Hub Roma

- 2017 "Absolute colors" at Ass. Culturale Crunch, Rome

- 2023 “Imperfect Chromies” at Contemporary ArShop, Rome

- 2023 "Welcome to Lillo Sauto's home" at Casa 64 Exibar

-2024 “Nel sogno” at Medina Art Gallery, Rome

-2025 Between Circles and Soul at Contemporary ArtShop Rome

Group exhibitions, Art Fairs, awards/certificates:
- 2016 'Materializzazioni e colori' group exhibition at Arte Borgo Gallery, Rome

- 2017 'Exposición de Arte Barcelona', group exhibition at Crisolart Gallery, Barcelona

- 2017 'The Nature of Women' Etoile Toy - Florence Dance Center, Florence

- 2017 'Profondo Blu' Art at Saloon: frames art & design,, Ariccia (RM)

- 2017 “#white#red#black”, Spazio40 Art Gallery, Rome

- 2017/2018 RomArt International Biennale of Art and Culture, Stadio Domiziano, Rome

- 2018 "Materia e colore", Area Arte Contesa, Rome

- Leonardo da Vinci International Prize for promoting Italian art and creativity, ArtNow-Effetto Arte- Serradifalco
Publisher Entertainment, October 2020

- Selected for nomination for Artist of the Year - Creativity Award 2020, Palermo ArteExpo

- 2020/2021 new_abstract at Galleria Rosso Cinabro, Rome

- 2020/2021 in_times_of_change at Galleria Rosso Cinabro, Rome

- 2021, "Art in Quarantine" at the Milano Art Gallery, Milan

- 2021 “Deep Blue III Ed.” at Presso Art Saloon: frames art & design, Ariccia (RM).

- 2022 "Forum on Landscape" at the Hall of Honour of the Palazzo Pretorio of Terra del Sole, Castrocaro Terme

- 2022 Art Tales, at Art Saloon: frames & design, Ariccia (RM)

- 2022 I thought it was love, an art collective against violence against women in the hospitals of Rome's ASL 6

- April 17–26, 2023 New York Artexpo with the works "Furore", "Narciso" and "Amanda"

- June 13–16, 2023, Art Basel Basel, featured in a video exhibition with the works “Venere senza difetti” and “Desiderio”.

- 2023 Art Basel. Basel

Bibliography

Publications
- Publication in ArtNow issue V - Year III September/October 2020

- Publication in ArtNow issue VII -Year IV January/February 2021

- Biancoscuro Art Contest, present with the works Sicilia, stato d'animo, and Una notte luminosa, which has darkened every sadness.
January 2021

- 23/02/2021 Mondadori Arte catalog in quarantine, featuring the work Una notte luminosa has obscured all sadness

- published in Atlante dell'Arte Contemporanea 2021, De Agostini Ed., included with a critical note, among the painters of Sicily,
January 2022.

- 03/2022 Publication: Monograph 'I colori dell’arte', Asba Edizioni

- June 27, 2023, publication of the exhibition "Welcome to Lillo Sauto's Home" in Exibart magazine.

-1 July 2023: Guest as a studio artist on the Weekly program on Rai1, creating a piece live.

-2024 Artisti 24 International Yearbook of Contemporary Art edited by Mondadori