Silvio Porzionato is a figurative painter who prefers oil paint on large canvases by using photographs of friends and people he meets on the street that have inspired him. His figures are depicted in statuary close-up, although ordinary people; they have the power to make us forget the typical private dimension of the portrait and, at the same time, they have the power to become icons of the human race.
The artist was born in Moncalieri (TO) in 1971. After graduating from art school, he was head designer, for a decade, of an important company in Turin. After some time, as Porzionato has declared, he felt the call of «silence of the land of Roero» and decided to start a new life in the silence of the countryside, closely to nature and art.
Porzionato immediately proved to be a revelation in the national art scene: after only one year he was selected for Mondadori Art Prize, in 2010 he won the critics' prize in Saluzzo Arte and then he made a permanent work for the Museum of Urban Art in Turin. In 2011 he was selected for the 54th Biennale di Venezia exhibiting both in the Regional Pavilion of Piemonte and in the Italian Pavilion in Turin. In 2013 he created three large installations entitled Codice Temporale for MACS (Museum of Contemporary Art in Sicily) in Catania. For the exhibition, the artist made 112 portraits of faces of people, as a narration and mimesis of the passing of time through the changing of the somatic traits of each individual. A visual path in which the viewer is pushed to reflect himself, as in front of a large mirror which opens to his past and his future, in an alienating continuum from childhood to old age. In 2016, after the first group exhibitions and US experiences, with the solo show It's Life at the Artspace8 Gallery he bursts overseas on the figurative scene of the city of Chicago (USA). Since then, his works have been exhibited all over the world and are shown in the most important art galleries, from Hong Kong to London, Paris, Bogotá, New York, Miami, Chicago and Istanbul. He has taken part in some of the most important art fairs in the US – especially in Art Miami – as well as in the art fairs in the UK, Korea, Colombia, Turkey and Peru. He lives and works in Pancalieri, near Turin.
