Salvo *
(Leonforte, Sicily, 1947–2015 Turin)
Una sera, 2004, signed and titled on the reverse, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, framed
This work is registered in the Archivio Salvo, Turin and is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity.
This work is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Provenance:
Biasutti & Biasutti Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (label on the reverse)
European Private Collection
Exhibited:
Milan, The World of Salvo, Sotheby’s, Palazzo Serbelloni, 8 – 22 February 2024
Recent years have seen Salvo, born Salvatore Mangione (Leonforte 1947–Turin 2015), attract ever greater attention from art historians and collectors alike. His reputation as one of the defining figures of Italian art in the second half of the 20th century is now firmly established well beyond Italy. The artist’s work has found particular resonance among collectors in East Asia and the United States.
A closer look at Salvo’s artistic development helps explain this growing interest. For all its apparent diversity, his work reveals a remarkable consistency, charting a distinctive course through the history of contemporary Italian art.
Influenced by Turin’s Arte Povera milieu and his exchanges with artists including Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio, Salvo developed a rigorously conceptual body of work between 1969 and 1972, encompassing his marble plaques, photographic self-portraits and works addressing questions of identity and language. In 1973, however, he made a decisive break with the prevailing tendencies of the time and returned to painting. Through his engagement with the masters of the past, he ultimately developed a distinctive figurative vocabulary of his own.
Una Sera belongs to a series of twilight landscapes that are among the most distinctive works of Salvo’s mature period. These paintings bring the defining elements of his visual language into particularly sharp focus.
Overlapping pictorial planes and sharply defined, almost cut-out silhouettes structure the composition; in the foreground are a pine with an umbrella-shaped crown, a dark, slender cypress and a palm with tapering leaves. A broken column stands at the centre – a relic of antiquity that enters into a silent dialogue with other ruins scattered across the scene. Trees and ancient architecture are recurring motifs in Salvo’s work. At once Mediterranean and timeless, the iconography lies somewhere between memories of the Italian landscape and impressions gathered during his many travels.
This pictorial structure is closely bound up with one of the defining features of Salvo’s painting: his use of colour as an expressive medium in its own right, freed from a purely descriptive function. The sky unfolds in successive bands, from luminous yellow through orange and magenta to the violet of approaching night, creating a chromatic symphony of clear, saturated fields of colour. Rather than modelling forms through illusionistic chiaroscuro, these fields emphasise their flatness. Salvo’s sustained engagement with the history of painting – from Giotto to the early Italian masters – is evident here, reinterpreted through a language of immediate visual presence and compositional rigour.
The timeless quality, stillness and unreal light of the scene also recall the tradition of metaphysical painting, the imagery of which Salvo adopts and transforms. Yet while Giorgio de Chirico conjures enigmatic, at times unsettling spaces, Salvo turns that disquiet into a more accessible, luminous vision. The metaphysical loses its threatening undertone and gives way to a pure manifestation of colour: immediately sensuous, yet underpinned by subtle conceptual sophistication.
Specialist: Alessandro Rizzi
(Leonforte, Sicily, 1947–2015 Turin)
Una sera, 2004, signed and titled on the reverse, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, framed
This work is registered in the Archivio Salvo, Turin and is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity.
This work is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Provenance:
Biasutti & Biasutti Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (label on the reverse)
European Private Collection
Exhibited:
Milan, The World of Salvo, Sotheby’s, Palazzo Serbelloni, 8 – 22 February 2024
Recent years have seen Salvo, born Salvatore Mangione (Leonforte 1947–Turin 2015), attract ever greater attention from art historians and collectors alike. His reputation as one of the defining figures of Italian art in the second half of the 20th century is now firmly established well beyond Italy. The artist’s work has found particular resonance among collectors in East Asia and the United States.
A closer look at Salvo’s artistic development helps explain this growing interest. For all its apparent diversity, his work reveals a remarkable consistency, charting a distinctive course through the history of contemporary Italian art.
Influenced by Turin’s Arte Povera milieu and his exchanges with artists including Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio, Salvo developed a rigorously conceptual body of work between 1969 and 1972, encompassing his marble plaques, photographic self-portraits and works addressing questions of identity and language. In 1973, however, he made a decisive break with the prevailing tendencies of the time and returned to painting. Through his engagement with the masters of the past, he ultimately developed a distinctive figurative vocabulary of his own.
Una Sera belongs to a series of twilight landscapes that are among the most distinctive works of Salvo’s mature period. These paintings bring the defining elements of his visual language into particularly sharp focus.
Overlapping pictorial planes and sharply defined, almost cut-out silhouettes structure the composition; in the foreground are a pine with an umbrella-shaped crown, a dark, slender cypress and a palm with tapering leaves. A broken column stands at the centre – a relic of antiquity that enters into a silent dialogue with other ruins scattered across the scene. Trees and ancient architecture are recurring motifs in Salvo’s work. At once Mediterranean and timeless, the iconography lies somewhere between memories of the Italian landscape and impressions gathered during his many travels.
This pictorial structure is closely bound up with one of the defining features of Salvo’s painting: his use of colour as an expressive medium in its own right, freed from a purely descriptive function. The sky unfolds in successive bands, from luminous yellow through orange and magenta to the violet of approaching night, creating a chromatic symphony of clear, saturated fields of colour. Rather than modelling forms through illusionistic chiaroscuro, these fields emphasise their flatness. Salvo’s sustained engagement with the history of painting – from Giotto to the early Italian masters – is evident here, reinterpreted through a language of immediate visual presence and compositional rigour.
The timeless quality, stillness and unreal light of the scene also recall the tradition of metaphysical painting, the imagery of which Salvo adopts and transforms. Yet while Giorgio de Chirico conjures enigmatic, at times unsettling spaces, Salvo turns that disquiet into a more accessible, luminous vision. The metaphysical loses its threatening undertone and gives way to a pure manifestation of colour: immediately sensuous, yet underpinned by subtle conceptual sophistication.
Specialist: Alessandro Rizzi
