Saul first exhibited in 2005 in a small gallery in Milan.

 

His rise to international success has been astonishing; he now has works in permanent collections in New York, London, Paris, Milan, Basel, Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo.

 

Saul was born in Mendrisio in Switzerland in 1977.

 

Although his passion for painting and sculpture was evident from a very young age, he decided to study philosophy.

It is easy to see the influence of a philosophical brain in his work.

 

Saul works in an analytical way; a complex layering of interpretation flows from each of Saul's portraits giving us a new version of his subject.

 

His subjects are: friends, stars, famous drag queens, icons of a fantastic world and select international commissions.

 

Like an aesthetic surgeon, Saul morphs, squeezes and twists forms; he changes human bodies into artificial lifeforms which are trapped in a Zanolari world.

 

Like a contemporary Dorian Gray, his subjects harbour dark and secret souls and, with a good measure of irony, they become: icons of universal themes - beauty, motherhood, problems of adolescence -, and some highlight issues like artificial insemination, solitude and depression.

 

Saul creates a new artistic amalgam - not photography, not digital imagery, not painting, but a complex fusion of all three.

 

The outcome is an ex novo portrait: an innovative artistic work.

 

The world of Saul Zanolari is silent and dark, his subjects trapped in time, motionless with a twisted glint in their eyes.