An established artist from Catania, a graduate of the Artistic High School of the city and a lover of art and painting from an early age, Salvatore Barbagallo has long devoted himself to the study of Sicilian futurism, Cubism and avant-garde art, which, in breaking with the classic representation of art, they portray reality not as static and crystallized, but as multiform and dynamic, in a space that disappears by breaking up the object into abstract forms, which recompose and overlap in the artist's work, recreating the sense of movement and space in which everything flows and at the same time is fixed in a work of synthesis, in which everything interpenetrates.

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In Barbagallo's work, the chromatic superimposition of geometric shapes, defined by the critics as "harmonic fragments", recomposes a fragmented image in shapes and colors in a harmonious fabric in which dynamism is given by the recomposition according to asymmetrically arranged lines, which, thanks to the wise alternation of light and dark colors, it recreates the proportions of the image even at a distance, according to a geometric optical system resulting from the artist's study and technical precision.

The favorite subjects of the Master Barbagallo are the landscapes, the views of our beloved Sicilian land, human and abstract figures, sacred subjects, and, not least, the social and denunciation themes, in particular those that emphasize the alienations of the individual in everyday life, but always immersed in a becoming of possibilities given to things and people, therefore not only a sterile denunciation of today's evils, but a prospect of hope given to the individuals who live there. In this perspective, the paintings that portray a series of urban glimpses of international cities take on a fundamental importance, in which the significant cultural traits of each of them emerge, and in which the human figures emerge finally freed from homologation and moral alienation and cultural that instead seem to characterize today's urban realities, globalized in a magma of indistinct and suffocating architectural traits in which the human dimension seems to have been lost.

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It is in this perspective that Salvatore Barbagallo, together with the artists Vera Ambra and Giorgio De Cesario, founded the "Alienism Movement" in Catania - presented in 2013 in a solo show in Gallipoli entitled "From Futurism to Verticalism" - which carries on and innovates the ideas of the "Verticalism" of Salvatore Commercio and Don Antonio Corsaro, according to which the universe and life, both biological and of the ego, evolve "vertically" or in an infinite field of possibilities, as opposed to the limitations of the "horizontal" dimension, in which the truth, which is expressed by art and by all human activities, consists in the "field of possibilities" that man can dominate thanks to freedom. For this reason, art, like all other human expressions, must undo the rigid artistic-cultural formulas, inserting itself in the social, always in a "vertical" sense, learning and experimenting with new techniques and languages, and always carrying forward the sign of originality.

The work of Barbagallo, therefore, is not limited to representing an existing or didactic visible, but reproduces a reality in progress, dominated by precise universal laws and philosophical truths revealed to the observer.

In this perspective, Salvatore Barbagallo also dedicated himself to sculpture, engraving, advertising graphics and, recently, also to the realization of murals in order to re-evaluate some old degraded areas of Catania.

The works of Master Barbagallo have been exhibited at the Harrow Arts Center in London (2000), at the Bonan Gallery in Venice (2001), at the Andromeda Association of Catania (2002), at the Palace of Culture in Catania for the Forty-year anniversary of Verticalism (2014), at the Teatro Sistina in Rome, for an important collective exhibition on Verticalism (2015) and are present in important public and private collections. In 2005 he was awarded the Biennial Art Prize of Venice "RIALTO", with motivation written by the well-known art critic Giorgio Falossi. He was artistic co-director of the "Verticalist Gallery" of Catania.