It may seem amazing, but all these paintings come from real photographs of real events. Italian Artist Salvatore Alessi began each of these works from an existing photograph. His work is interesting and challenging, but as he describes it, it is not surreal. The whole point of his work is that it comes from reality, from real photographs. No matter how strange his reinterpretation is it still comes from the real world.
His paintings all focus around an event featuring people. His reinterpretation sometimes includes breaking a few rules of gravity, but using the same people that must have been featured in the photographs. A commute of men in their suits, for example, turns into a series of floating figures with their phones and suitcases. A gathering could turn into an enchanting scene of people floating through hoops and distorted faces. It is never clear what is real and what isn’t when looking at Alessi’s work. This is what makes his paintings so challenging and fascinating to the human eye. They become even more interesting when the artist says they are not surreal, but based on our reality, our world. How can this be? Well, this is the reaction that these paintings are meant to produce. We must question our sense of reality in order to really understand it.
