SALVO. Sicilie e città is part of a process of study and research that Dep Art Gallery has been carrying out for several years on the work of Salvo, real name Salvatore Mangione (Leonforte, 1947 - Turin, 2015), formerly the protagonist of three solo exhibitions hosted by the gallery in 2007, 2010 and 2017. On the occasion of this fourth monographic exhibition, the aim is to offer a new look at a rarer production of the artist, who returned to painting after his first experience with Arte Povera, exploring on the one hand the complexity of his pictorial research – in the relationship between spatiality, rendering of light and chromatic sensitivity – and on the other hand his personal reinterpretation of the classical pictorial tradition.
In the mid-1970s, Salvo painted his first Italie and Sicilie, of which this exhibition presents a valuable selection of large and small oil paintings as well as some drawings. These artworks play with the silhouettes of geographical maps on which a grid, as of meridians and parallels, is superimposed, being filled with the letters that make up the names of great Italian artists, philosophers and writers of all ages – such as in the 1975 artworks 20 Siciliani or Italia – followed by Salvo’s own name, according to a creative strategy of self-affirmation. These works combine the exercise of a self-referential and subtly self-ironic conceptuality with the rediscovery of the practice of painting, well in advance of later trends in international art.
The second part of the exhibition is devoted to the pictorial production starting from the 1980s. Through a selection of paintings on canvas from 1983 to 2003, the exhibit focuses on the artist’s investigation into the representation of the city. In these works, the synthesis of forms, the attention to perspective, and the study of color among the variations of shadows and light take center stage. Suspended between reality and imagination, the cityscapes, often nocturnal, become a pretext for depicting the glow of street lamps, neon lights, and cars silhouetted against imposing buildings being transformed into pure geometric solids, such as in the 1986 Periferia or in the 1988 large painting Senza titolo, portraying, in a view of Florence in a view of Florence in which one can recognise Giambologna’s Ratto delle Sabine.
As curator Gianluca Ranzi explains, “In these works, representation is always at the service of an idea of art that knows how to go beyond the world of appearances and things, to reach the definition of a new family of forms, a mental purifying of the artist’s eclectic and cultured vision, which combines reality with dreams, architectural solidity with the enigmas of light, topographical objectivity with subjective poetic invention”.
By bringing together these two cycles of artworks, the exhibition thus becomes a journey through the artist’s Sicilie and urban daydreams, as images assembled and transformed by his highly mobile mind that moves freely within the codes of art, enhanced by a fine and well-tempered manual execution. The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalog, Italian and English, providing a comprehensive presentation of Salvo’s entire artistic career along with the books and exhibitions to date dedicated to the author.
Information
SALVO. Sicilie and città
Curated by Gianluca Ranzi October 28th 2022 – January 28th 2023
Opening: Thursday, October 27th, 6 p.m.
Dep Art Gallery - via Comelico 40, Milan
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10.30 am – 7 pm www.depart.it
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Biographical note
SALVO (Leonforte, 1947 – Turin, 2015)
Salvo, real name Salvatore Mangione, was born in Leonforte in the province of Enna in 1947. In 1956, he and his family moved from Catania to Turin, his adopted city. From 1968 he joined Gian Enzo Sperone’s gallery with other protagonists of Arte Povera: Merz, Paolini, Penone, Pistoletto, Zorio and Boetti. He shared his studio precisely with Boetti until 1971. Salvo initially expressed himself through photographic manipulations and by making “substitutions”, an idea that he would resume later; he made marble tombstones and the “tricolore” (Italian flag), using different media. The themes of the search for the self, the narcissistic self-satisfaction, the relationship with the past and the history of culture, essential elements of his later research, are already present. In 1973 Salvo returned to painting, never to abandon it again, devoting himself to a series of d’apres works, where the comparison with classical masters and mythological themes stand out. Almost in parallel he painted the series of Sicilie and Italie, in which he listed the names of historical figures in geographical maps, among which he always placed his own name. Cities, valleys and landscapes from his travels stand among the iconic subjects of his painting, being interpreted more in shapes and colors than in non-essential details, to the point of developing a language that is a synthesis of his stylistic and aesthetic practice. He died in Turin in 2015. Salvo’s artworks have been exhibited at major international art events including Documenta 5 Kassel (1972), Venice Biennale (1976 and 1984), Rome Quadriennale (2005 and 2020).
