Laurent Marcel Salinas

Italian Man from the Ellis Island Series by Laurent Marcel Salinas

1994

Laurent Marcel Salinas was born in 1913 in Alexandria of a French mother and an Italian father. Salinas spent his early adult years between France and Egypt. He exhibited frequently at the Alexandria Atelier alongside Egyptian artists such as Mahmud Said and Muhammad magi. Following the 1952 revolution and the Suez Canal crisis, life became increasingly difficult for foreigners residing in Egypt, many were expelled and their assets seized. Marcel's mother and step-father, like many others, left the country. Among the possessions they lost were many of Marcel's early paintings. In the late 1950's, exiled in Paris and desparate for money, Salinas got a job in a lithography workshop. He rapidly became an expert. In 1969 he began work on a lithographic rendition of Picasso's 29 Portraits Imaginaries for the Editions Cercle d'Art that would receive the master's whole-hearted approval, making Salinas' name the only one ever to appear side by side with Picasso's. Salinas continued to paint throughout the last decades of his life, spent between Paris and New York, and between Brussels and St Louis. His prolific output as a painter falls mostly into three categories: landscapes, nudes, and still-lives. While he toyed at various times in his life with different stylistic paradigms, including those of cubism and fauvism, ultimately, Salinas’ commitment was to the poetry of light, color, and form as they were brought to bear on the representation of people, places, and objects. Salinas died in 2010.