Salvo

His first works, in the name of conceptual art, were presented as an investigation of narcissism, of the ego as a relationship between tradition and present. After his first trip to Afghanistan, in the summer of 1970, he exhibited his first self-portraits, in photomontage, in Milan. He began his ascent as an artist and exhibited, in the following three years, in New York, Cologne, Amsterdam, Paris, and Documenta Kassel 5. In addition to his photographic works, he also engraved words and phrases on marble, to explore the border between visual poetry and poor art. He rewrote novels where instead of the protagonist’s name he used his own.

1973 was the year of a sharp turn in his artistic career. After the initial experiments, he returned to painting, never to abandon it again. The artist’s new path, parallel to the geographical maps that he painted, took place in the name of his famous d’apres of the fifteenth century masters. Like De Chirico, Salvo’s goal seemed to have roots in the pictorial tradition and osmosis, the comparison with the pictorial geniuses of the past became an essential factor in his art.

Parallel to the d’apres, a further phase of his research led him to focus on the composition of landscapes with simplified geometric shapes, and later, with shrill, bright colors.

The fairytale dimension bursted into Salvo’s new work. Its nocturnes, like the views of countrysides or landscapes with minarets, range from oneirism to an emotional chromatism; from the extreme offshoots of narcissism, when the ego-artist was dominating in the early years, painting seemed to bring him back to a place of perennial amazement, of compositional joy.

In the nineties, Salvo was a well known Italian art master for the critics and also inspirational to novelists.

In the 2000s, the retrospectives dedicated to him thickened and Salvo took inspiration from his travels to China, Thailand, Egypt, Iceland.

He died in Turin in 2015 and in 2016 the Mehdi Chouakri Gallery dedicated a tribute to him from various contemporary artists.