Erik Saglia ITA, b. 1989

Erik Saglia (born in Turin in 1989) lives and works in Turin. After studying at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, where he graduated in 2014, he developed an artistic practice grounded in an in-depth investigation of materials and their expressive potential, combined with a rigorous craftsmanship of gesture. All of his works are entirely handmade, from the autonomous construction of the stretcher to the final stratification of the pictorial surface.

From his earliest works, Saglia has explored the implications of the modernist grid, adopting it as a starting structure and then emphasizing and reorganizing it. In his early practice, the grid was replicated through graph paper and spray paint, later through the use of adhesive tapes laid in precise orthogonal lines over camouflage-like fields. This disciplined and exact gesture, which subjects the body to a controlled practice, contrasts with the free aggregation of the underlying marks. In more recent works, the grid seems to momentarily dissolve into softer movements, only to re-emerge through the use of resin, applied with extreme precision and endowed with an almost sculptural thickness.

The recurring use of materials such as spray paint, mesh drywall tape, resin, aluminum, and airbrushing allows the artist to create sophisticated perceptual deceptions and unexpected textures. The paintings present themselves as complex stratifications of techniques and materials that resist a single, unified reading: prolonged viewing reveals continuously new details. Precisely because of this shifting and autonomous nature, the works do not have a fixed orientation. The surface thus becomes a field of tensions, capable of reflecting the viewer’s gaze, as occurs in the resin layers that imitate the effect of glass, transforming the painting into a reflective and immersive device.

Through this practice, Saglia renews the concept of the pictorial surface, eliminating biographical or pop references and reconnecting his work to the Spatialist research of Lucio Fontana and the conceptual legacy of Alighiero Boetti. The result is an original informal and material language in which the grid, rather than functioning as a rigid structure, becomes a living organism in continuous transformation.

Within this trajectory, the series Manifesti satellite, on which the artist has been working for several years, is dedicated to the representation of the satellites of the solar system. This ambitious project opens up the possibility of a very extensive body of work which, once completed, is intended to consist of more than four hundred paintings. Positioned at the threshold between poetic imagination and scientific research, the series transforms the cosmos and the sky into concrete, tangible presences. In Saglia’s paintings, the sky represents both the realm of future aspirations and the object of study of phenomena occurring beyond our planet. As the artist suggests, the works encourage a bodily posture that is elongated upward, toward the sky. Alongside his pictorial production, Saglia has increasingly focused on research into light. In 2024 he realized Euridome, a permanent installation for Luci d’Artista in Turin, an experience that brought him closer to experimentation with light and color.