On the canvas the Mole Antonelliana stands out among the tropical shrubs, in a corner a crocodile opens its jaws surrounded by giant ants: Turin and the Amazon, two places more than ten thousand kilometers away united by the art of Juan Salazar Orsi. Sixty-three years old, he arrived in Italy in 2001, leaving the city of Puccalpa, the second largest inhabited center in the Peruvian Amazon. He was driven by the instability of the South American country and by the desire to discover his roots: “My blood is a little Italian: my great-grandfather was from Tortona,” he smiles.
Indigenous geometries
In Peru he was a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts, today he is a worker in Cirié in a pipe factory that supplies automobile factories. But the passion for painting and sculpture has never put it aside. The home study, in a building in Falchera Vecchia, houses his creations: the fil rouge are the geometric shapes used by the Shipibo-Conibo, an indigenous population living in the Amazon along the Ucayali river. “When we were little, our parents took us to visit some relatives who had a farm there,” says Juan. As a child he was bewitched by the themes and techniques of that people and began to use them in art workshops at school: “It was a way to bring to life a culture not so well known, which could weaken to the point of risking oblivion if the new generations do not they pass it on, ”explains Juan, while showing a colorful ceramic with geometric motifs from the Shipibo-Conibo.
Canvases given away at the factory
In Turin Juan also graduated by attending the evening at the Renato Cottini Art High School. For his creations Juan also tries to use Amazonian “ingredients”, such as beeswax or vegetable ink extracted from the bark of the caoba, a tree typical of the South American tropics. It can also happen to use ayahuasca, a plant used for shamanic rituals. Some canvases he gave to colleagues in the factory, others he sold around the world. «Every two years I do a kind of tour – says Juan -. I pack my works and go to foreign cities: I recently went to Paris, Mexico City and Lima ». One of the paintings was bought for five hundred euros in France: a small gesture for the artistic resistance of the Shipibo-Conibo.