Saul Zanolari
(Mendrisio, Switzerland, 1977)
Saul Zanolari is a Swiss visual artist known for his exploration of identity and the essence of contemporary imagery. After earning a degree in Philosophy in 2004, with a focus on the History of Classical Rhetoric, he fully dedicated himself to painting, choosing a highly personal path outside academic conventions. In 2005, he shifted from traditional painting to digital painting — a medium he has always approached as a legitimate pictorial technique, not as a filter but as a brush.
From the very beginning, Zanolari developed a high-definition figurative style that merges traditional painting skills with digital craftsmanship and an obsessive attention to detail. His portraits, exhibited internationally, form a surreal, pop-inspired universe populated by drag queens, celebrities, and fashion icons — all deconstructed and reimagined as figures in a two-dimensional digital wax museum. His work blurs the lines between beauty and distortion, irony and critique.
This long artistic journey reached its peak with the monumental SZ cycle — ten years of work culminating in SZ Chapel, a 1:1 digital reproduction of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. An immense and intricate piece, the project took over three years to complete, with each figure, muscle, and hair meticulously redrawn and stripped of religious or censorious constraints. Together with SZ Boredom and SZ Cosmogony, the trilogy represents the apex of digital painting as both technique and conceptual exploration.
Once the SZ cycle was completed, Zanolari faced a deep personal and creative crisis. Exhausted from the virtuosity of digital mastery, he found himself in silence, unable to create. Out of that void came a radical shift — a need to restart completely.
This rebirth gave life to XXY, a new visual and conceptual language. A deliberate reset of form, driven by a search for enthusiasm — something increasingly rare in today’s art world. Zanolari began again with what was close to him: the people who had touched his life during the silent years. The portraits in XXY PORTRAITS 2025 are stripped bare — free of nuance, of narrative identity — leaving only the essential. The eyes are gone, replaced by genetic codes: XX for female subjects, XY for male ones. It’s a return to origins, a new alphabet, a human code.
With the museum project XXY – de’ Medici, presented at the Museo de’ Medici in Florence in 2025, Zanolari expands this language to historical portraiture, reinterpreting more than 30 figures from the Medici family and their cultural world through a symbolic and contemporary lens. The works — engraved and painted on wooden panels with a reduced color palette — become sculptural totems arranged in vertical structures. An essential pantheon where power, memory, and identity are redefined through visual minimalism.
Today, Saul Zanolari’s work is a reflection on the urgency to reinvent visual language — to strip it of decorative overload and restore the raw, primal strength of the sign. His art invites us to look beyond appearances and rediscover what truly connects us as human beings.
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