Salvo (artist)

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, which always remained his adoptive city. In the early 1960s he began painting and supported himself by selling low-priced portraits, landscapes and copies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. In 1963 he participated in the 121st Esposizione della Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti with a drawing after Leonardo.

1968-1972

Between September and December 1968, the artist was in Paris, swept off his feet by the cultural climate of the student protests. After returning to Turin, he began spending time with the artists involved in the Arte Povera movement, whose point of reference was the gallery owned by Gian Enzo Sperone. He met Boetti; they became friends and shared a studio until 1971. He also met Mario and Marisa Merz, Paolini, Penone, Pistoletto, Zorio, as well as the critics Renato Barilli, Germano Celant, and Achille Bonito Oliva.

In 1969 he got involved with the American Conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, and Sol LeWitt. In the summer he embarked on his first long journey to Afghanistan, to be followed by others. He began making works that already clearly showed up the themes—the search for the Self, narcissistic self-satisfaction, the relationship with the past and with the history of culture—that became an essential part of his later research.

These included the photograph Autoritratto come Raffaello and the 12 autoritratti series where he mounted his own face on images taken from newspapers, shown at the Sperone Gallery in 1970 for his first solo show. In parallel with his photographic works, Salvo made marble panels on which he carved words or sentences, such as Idiota, Respirare il padre, Io sono il migliore. Although the works were developed within the context of the Arte Povera movement, their monumental and archaicizing connotations reveal their unique nature and foreshadow the artist’s future research.

Salvo è vivo was made in 1970, and it is now exhibited at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and at the Neues Museum in Weimar. The following year he made 40 nomi, a list of illustrious names that go from Aristotle to Salvo. He continued to work on his series of marble plaques throughout 1972, with inscriptions from a variety of sources, such as an Assyrian text inIl lamento di Assurbanipal or one of Aesop’s fables for La tartaruga e l’aquila.

In 1971 he began making Tricolore, surfaces on which he wrote “Salvo” in red, white, and green or in neon lettering, as well as copies of novels he personally transcribed where he used the same process of substituting self-portraits by inserting his name in lieu of that of the main character; a case in point is Salvo nel paese delle meraviglie (after Carroll) and L’isola del tesoro (after Stevenson). Over the course of the year he met Cristina, his lifetime partner.

Robert Barry introduced him to Paul Maenz. Thus began Salvo’s long friendship and work relationship with the German art dealer, who had a solo show of the artist’s work in his Cologne gallery in June, preceded by the artist’s Paris debut at the Galerie Yvon Lambert in March.[4] In June 1972 he met John Weber, and his last exhibition of Conceptual works was planned to be held in the New York gallery the following January. That same year Salvo took part in Documenta 5 in Kassel.

1973-1979

Salvo, Io sono il migliore, 1970, marble, 80 cm × 100 cm (31 in × 39 in)

Salvo made a crucial decision in 1973 when he went back to painting, which he never again abandoned. A return to traditional techniques had already been visible in several Autoritratti benedicenti drawn between 1968 and 1969. With the intention of revisiting art history Salvo proceeded to make his works known as d’après. Citing an old master painting does not necessarily mean copying it tout court, but rather doing it over in a simplified key, where the artist at times adds images of himself according to the process of the self-portrait.

These works, inspired by such great fifteenth-century masters as Cosmè Tura and Raphael, were shown in numerous exhibitions. The following year Projekt ’74 opened in Cologne: Salvo asked that his works not be shown at the Kunsthalle, the seat of the exhibition, but in a room at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, where San Martino e il povero, dated to 1973 (now at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin), was placed next to the masterpieces of one painter for each century, for example, Simone Martini, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Rembrandt, and Cézanne.

Also in 1974 Salvo took part in the group show La ripetizione differente curated by Renato Barilli and held at the Studio Marconi in Milan. In December he showed a single work, the Trionfo di San Giorgio (da Carpaccio), over seven metres in size, at the Toselli Gallery; the work was also shown at the 1976 Venice Biennale.[5] He painted his first Italie and Sicilie. These consisted of clearly recognizable geographic maps bearing the names of famous philosophers, painters, writers followed by Salvo’s own name, all of which are neatly marked on the surface.

In 1976 there was a change in his research. He developed a series of landscapes in which he used bright colours to depict horsemen amidst architectural ruins and visions of classical columns, viewed at different times of the day or night. He met Giuliano Briganti and Luisa Laureati, and Luciano Pistoi, the art dealer with whom he had a close relationship for many years. In 1977 his daughter Norma was born, and for the first time ever a museum hosted a retrospective of his work. Curated by Zdenek Felix for the Museum Folkwang of Essen, this major exhibition then travelled to the Kunstverein in Mannheim.[6] Also in 1977 he finished his Giganti fulminati da Giove, one of the largest of his works made during his mythological period. He had several solo shows, including an exhibition on the Capriccio at the Stein Gallery in Turin, later mounted at both the Francoise Lambert and the Pero Gallery, in Milan, and the Massimo Minini in Brescia, and he also participated in several group shows, including one at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna and another one at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York.[7]

1980-1999

Between late 1979 and 1980 Salvo painted a series of landscapes with country homes, churches, and monuments such as San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo and the Tower of Pisa; appearing for the first time are trees inspired by Giotto and vegetation. Between 1982 and 1983 he gained further acclaim in Europe. After the major retrospective organized by Massimo Minini at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, the following year his most significant works post-1973 were shown at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, and later at the Nouveau Musée di Villeurbanne, near Lyon.

It was the start of his relationship with the writers Giuseppe Pontiggia and Leonardo Sciascia, who dedicated some of their writings to him. In the summer of 1984 Maurizio Calvesi invited Salvo to Arte allo specchio at the 41st Venice Biennale: he showed six of his works, including San Martino e il povero, Il bar, made in 1981, and a painting from the cycle Rovine dated to 1984. Upon returning from a long trip to Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, he painted mishram, the typical Muslim graves he had visited in Sarajevo. This theme, introduced by Franco Toselli, was followed by Ottomanie (a neologism coined by Salvo), variants of the previous landscapes featuring minarets portrayed to reveal the essentiality of their architecture.

In 1986 the treatise Della Pittura. Imitazione di Wittgenstein was published; it consisted of 238 short paragraphs in which Salvo gathered his thoughts on painting according to the method of the axiomatic proposition and the rhetorical question. The volume was published in Italian, English, German, and Spanish.[8] He met Daniele Pescali, who was his main art dealer from 1987 to 1995.

In 1988 he held two institutional exhibitions, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nimes. He painted works inspired by the paintings of Pieter Jansz Saenredam; Interni con funzioni straordinarie were shown at the In Arco Gallery in Turin in 1991. In 1992 Renato Barilli was the curator of the artist’s solo show Archeologie del futuro hosted by the Galleria dello Scudo in Verona; the catalogue included essays by Giuseppe Pontiggia, Paul Maenz, and Luigi Meneghelli. In the 1990s Salvo made several series of paintings devoted to some of the places he has visited, including Oman, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Tibet, Nepal, Ethiopia, as well as much of Europe, in particular France, Germany, and Norway. From 1995 onwards Salvo began spending several months a year in the gulf of Policastro and the Po Valley, near Monviso, places that inspired many of his works. In those years he met and spent time with the writer Nico Orengo, for whom he illustrated the book Cucina crudele in 2003. In 1998 he had a retrospective exhibition at Villa delle Rose, the seat of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, curated by Renato Barilli and Danilo Eccher.

Salvo, La Valle, 2008, oil on wooden table, 40 cm × 60 cm (16 in × 24 in)

2000-2015

In the 2000s other trips inspired the artist’s painting, especially ones to China, Thailand, Egypt, and Iceland. He had several solo shows, including ones at Zonca & Zonca in Milan, Raffaelli in Trento, and Mazzoleni in Turin, and in public spaces like Palazzina Azzurra in S. Benedetto del Tronto and Trevi Flash Art Museum (curator Luca Beatrice), and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, for a two-man show with Gabriele Basilico, curator Giacinto Di Pietrantonio. During these years his painting embraced the subject of the lowlands, and he introduced a new perspective in his landscapes. Turin, his adoptive city, devoted a major retrospective of his work at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, with curator Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, in 2007. Salvo spent a great deal of time in Costigliole d’Asti, located between the Langhe and Monferrato, whose hillside landscapes appear in his last works.

In 2013 he began working with the Mehdi Chouakri Gallery in Berlin, where a solo show of his work was held in 2014. That same year, in addition to painting his favorite subjects like landscapes and still lifes, he went back to some of the subjects he had abandoned over three decades before, but in a new key; he made a large-scale Italia, a Sicilia and a Bar, which he presented in March 2015 on the occasion of his solo show at the Mazzoli Gallery in Modena. He died on 12 September 2015 in Turin.[9]

2015-2020

In 2016 the Mehdi Chouakri gallery organized the exhibition Salvo è vivo – an homage, with works by Haris Epaminonda, Douglas Gordon & Morgan Tschiember, Jonathan Monk, Claudia & Julia Müller, Bernd Ribbeck, Francesco Vezzoli. In the same year the Archivio Salvo was founded in Turin, which organized an exhibition of works by Jonathan Monk dedicated to Salvo. In 2017 a double solo show of Salvo and Alighiero Boetti was organized at Masi in Lugano, curated by Bettina Della Casa, and the following year the exhibition L’Almanachat the Consortium in Dijon hosted a room of works by Salvo.[10] Two more personal exhibitions follow: in 2019 at the Norma Mangione gallery, Turin and in 2020 at Gladstone Gallery, New York.[11]

Archivio Salvo