Salvatore Garzillo started asking questions while he was still a little boy without a moustache. He grew up in Naples in the 90s, a difficult and not very hospitable neighborhood. And when he heard the echo of score settling or the whistling of bullets he ran into his mother’s arms asking: who? how? why? She hugged him hard and dismissed him with a kiss: «You ask too many questions». Little by little Salvatore understood that to get answers he had to be a reporter. Pen, notebook, comfortable shoes to go far. In just a few years he has become a top- crime journalist.
Salvatore Garzillo, “I’m afraid to go out.” Drawn in Saltivka (Kharkiv), Ukraine, 2022, courtesy of the artist
He has carried out investigations and investigated trials. Always on the black edge. Always one step ahead of the others. But the real turning point came one day in 2010. A day that was quite lacking in news and full of blood. The policeman in charge of the morning throws in a joke to calm things down. He’s not funny, even the agent knows it, but everyone smiles and Garzillo draws faces and defects from that surreal scene. «It was an epiphany for me. I had been drawing since I was a child, but for the first time I understood that I could draw my thoughts». The chronicler-artist was born. He is thin, fast, with the face of a good boy that he invites us to trust. He holds the pen in his hand and seems like an eternal student, «if you only knew how many slaps it saved me from». In the police headquarters building in via Fatebenefratelli in Milan, many people know and admire him. His notebooks are artworks. His talent is unique in the world of drawing. In the notebook he hides a treasure chest of news events: below, the iron story of the murdered dead man, the time, the place, the morbid scene of the crime and the ramshackle testimony of the gaunt neighbor… above, the drawing that emerges in the mind of the reporter, most often rendered in the form of «funny aesthetics because the most grim fact is a synthesis of misery and humanity and humanity cannot stand without irony». «Drawing is a physical necessity for me» says Garzillo.
Salvatore Garzillo, “A soldier of the NPU, the Christian militia that defends the faithful from ISIS attacks”. Drawn in Samarra (Baghdad), Iraq, 2021, courtesy of the artist
Until July he will be a chosen guest of the exhibition “The Geography of Stories” at the Rimini Drawing Biennale. There will be two macro areas: “the Black”, that is, a room containing the drawings made in the black, from the ‘Ndrangheta murder to the Impagnatiello trial up to the “dust” of the narrative which is fragmented in the lanky faces of the old men of a burning retirement home or the torment of a street thief caught red-handed. The other section is called “Over there”, because life is always about going far away to find places and facts, to understand them and bring them within the narrow view of us mere mortals with our asses sitting in an armchair. Garzillo was in Iraq then in Ukraine, the first three months of the Russian invasion, the hot front of the war, when you feel the wind blowing that smells of precipice and torment and the earth of the place becomes a pigment with which to color the scene. «The art of drawing is so ancient that it has become new», explains the journalist. «With one difference: previously we drew to remember a face or an event. Today drawing is the demonstration that you exist and this time exists». In any case, «there is no more ironic and sharp medium. The drawing is subtle, if done with sincerity it can be like a machete blow to the stomach».
Salvatore Garzillo, “Am I still alive?”. Drawn in Avdiïvka, Ukraine, 2022, courtesy of the artist
It also happened with the drawings from Bucha. «I was in the place of the mass graves, there was nothing around». Just a damn smell of death and a spindly tree. «I looked at this tree and thought that it was already there before the war, when Bucha sparkled with life and events. Then during the war, when the bodies of women and children fell, dragged by bombs and rifles. And it would have been there afterwards, in front of the immense and salvific reconstruction work. At that moment he was the best witness in history». And then how do you draw a tortured body? «It’s pure pornography… I was in Donbass in Kramators’k. I had arrived a few minutes after the bombing of the train station, sixty corpses scattered on the ground and this tiny girl torn to shreds by the bombs. They couldn’t put it back together and put it back in the bag. Soldiers armed to the teeth who didn’t know what to do when faced with a crushed little girl. From a blanket I saw a hand holding a key emerge, perhaps it was the mother. And that key struck me very much, it could have belonged to the house they were leaving or to the one they were headed to». Confused thoughts. A stunner. «There was a boy with shoes the same as mine». The crooked laces, the helpless foot. The hand that vibrates. The design that takes shape. A stunning thought: «it could have been me in his place!». Testify, testify, testify. In every way possible. Garzillo, however, always uses the pen, «I like the idea of not erasing».
Salvatore Garzillo, “Far away from home”. Drawn in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2022, courtesy of the artist
«At the beginning I only reproduced faces and people that corresponded to reality to find security. Now I often draw people with animalistic features, especially my sources». After all, animals have taught us how to exist in the world since Aesop’s time. There is the great dragon, a very good and dazzling investigator. Then the turtle, a very wise and thoughtful policeman from the homicide section. Finally the buffalo, the anti-terrorism man, apparently ugly but with a majestic and unsettling power. Even the facts of life sometimes bend to the simple law of animals. The toad, for example, was the famous Prince Charming of a crime story. «I was at the mobile and they had arrested this beautiful guy who had a crazy job and who everyone loved and admired. But he was a serial rapist, and a colleague tells me: they arrested Prince Charming. I immediately thought of him and drew him as a toad». Then comes Impagnatiello. The ogre. The ferocious and ruthless killer of two innocent creatures. He killed his girlfriend, he killed the child he was carrying. «In the courtroom I always saw him gathered on a stool, closed in on himself, the feeling he gave me was that he wanted to disappear from the world. Everyone told me “he’s closed himself off like a hedgehog” but a hedgehog has thorns and I don’t think he’s capable of offending anymore».
Salvatore Garzillo, “The ghosts underground”. Drawn in Avdiïvka, Ukraine, 2022, courtesy of the artist
The ruthless killer, in the hands of the reporter-artist, has then become a small ball insect, a pot-bellied worm little more than a centimeter big, you touch it and it closes and withdraws cowardly, children in the summer take a sadistic pleasure in making it tumble from the stairs. It exists, it doesn’t exist, it means nothing to the world and it’s not even scary anymore. In the long run you end up having to deal with yourself too. You too are on the frenetic wheel of life and you cannot escape the narrative. And then the self-portrait was born. «My most beautiful one of all is an empty silhouette with a tangle of threads in the heart and mind. But I could also represent myself as a little bird because the little bird is underestimated. It seems sweet and harmless to you and maybe in the most important moment of your life it shits on your head and dirty your dress bringing you back to harsh reality». Wisdom from reporters or maybe just the Neapolitan level: «You can be the most important man on earth but there will always be a little bird ready to shit on your head and ruin your party».
Simona Bertuzzi
Info:
Salvatore Garzillo. “La geografia delle storie”
curated by Alessandro Mori
17/05 – 28/07/2024
Palazzo Bartolini
Via Giuseppe Verdi, 11
47921 Rimini
www.biennaledisegnorimini.it
is a contemporary art magazine since 1980
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