Salvatore Fiorello (b.1976) is a painter based in Hackney, East London. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, to an Italian father and British mother. After spending his early childhood in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, he returned to the UK in the mid 1980s. He completed his BA in Birmingham in 1998 and MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 2000. His first solo show 'Small Hours' was held at Blue Shop Gallery in 2024. Salvatore’s work explores peripheries within the landscape, reoccurring motifs such as fences, trees/foliage and windows act as both boundaries and portals, offering suggestions of what might be happening beyond the frame or behind what is visible. The viewer’s gaze is restricted somehow, allowing only a slice of the whole to be revealed. Although painted on a small scale, the scenes transmit potentially cinematic or filmic portrayals of space and time. Functioning as in-between states, these everyday scenes and places, often nocturnal, simultaneously evoke both a sense of ambiguity and familiarity. Despite the connections to real physical places, the paintings ultimately explore the human condition, contemplation, memory and the subconscious.
‘Between Days’ brings together a new body of paintings by Salvatore Fiorello, his second solo show with Blue Shop Gallery. It is easy to feel a sense of solitude and introspection within Salvatore’s landscapes, spaces that are devoid of human presence, yet rich with emotional resonance. Through their luminous atmospheres, subtly layered colours, and an undercurrent of nostalgia, Salvatore invites us to engage more deeply with the natural world. His paintings ask us to notice the transient beauty in our surroundings - those fleeting, often-overlooked moments that risk vanishing. Attention to the materiality of painting underscores his work: the behavior of light, its shifting temperaments and elusive presence, is a constant thread. His preoccupation with the mystery of twilight, to the strange, in-between hour where day dissolves into night, capturing the ephemeral quality of that threshold.
Many of the works on show explore a meditative, almost ritual return to a single place in time, a space between days or beyond linear time. By isolating smaller sections within the original scene, this emphasises the act of re-seeing. Inherently, these paintings explore moments suspended between light and shadow, memory, present experience and the subconscious. The work invites viewers into those in-between states we rarely articulate: the eeriness of returning to a childhood home, the strange familiarity of déjà vu, the sadness in a summer evening light. Salvatore’s paintings quietly mirror the psyche, especially in its most reflective or haunted moments.