Credito Valtellinese Gallery and the Municipal Palace show-rooms host works by Renzo Sala: his distempered pictures, oil on canvas and, above all, drawings he made between 1955 and 1973. One hundred-thirty pieces were recovered among art collectors, Sala's friends and relatives. The artist, who always said he was from Valtellina, prematurely died just when he was attaining a lively modernity. His wide anthology goes through the stages of the painter's artistic career, from his naive debuts, where bright colours and realistic dreaming figures predominate, until the tormented surrealistic fantasies of his pen drawings or his China ink drawings. Sala's works are not homogeneous. He went through discordant phases that reveal his deep knowledge, what he learned from the masters of the past (the Flemish artists, Durer, the late XIX century symbolists) that he evoked in an absolutely original and innovative style. He painted splendid animals reminding of the pictures painted by Arcimboldo, full of tiny and precious flower decorations or human body interlacements in miniature. Animals and nude are the artist's favourite subjects. He often painted such themes adopting each time different very expressive formal solutions.

Renzo Sala was born in Menaggio (Como) on February 4, 1930. In 1951, he took his school-leaving examination in Brera academy and, always in Milan, attended the School of Applied Arts. Subsequently, he moved to Sondrio, where he taught history of the art and drawing. In the same time, he cultivated his passion for furnishing, antique-dealing, restoration. Although he decided to live in Valtellina, he liked to travel and had social intercourse with very famous intellectuals. In 1966, he illustrated some of the novels by Italo Calvino. During a stay in Greece, he had a serious accident. He fell down the Salonika fortress and fractured both of his legs. The immobility offered him more time for drawing, in particular for studying anatomy. In 1972, he abandoned the teacher profession and devoted himself exclusively to the art. He died in a car accident, on May 14, 1973.