Dep Art Gallery dedicates a monographic exhibition to Salvo on his Sicilies and cities

From October 28, 2022 to January 28, 2023, Dep Art Gallery in Milan presents the exhibition SALVO. Sicilies and Cities, curated by Gianluca Ranzi. The exhibition aims to focus attention on two distinct moments in the production of Salvo, stage name for Salvatore Mangione (Leonforte, 1947 - Turin, 2015): the Sicilies and Italies of the 1970s and the theme of the city, through a series of paintings ranging from 1983 to 2003.

The exhibition is part of a path of study and research that Dep Art Gallery has been carrying out for several years on the work of Salvo, already the protagonist of three solo exhibitions at the gallery in 2007, 2010 and 2017. For this fourth monographic exhibition, the gallery intends to offer a new look at a rarer production of the artist, at the moment of his return to painting after his experience witharte povera, exploring on the one hand the complexity of his pictorial research, in the relationship between spatiality, light rendering and chromatic sensitivity, and on the other hand the personal reinterpretation of the classical pictorial tradition.

In the mid-1970s, Salvo painted his first Italies and Sicilies: on display will be a selection of large and small oil paintings as well as some drawings. These works play with the silhouettes of geographic maps on which a grid of meridians and parallels is superimposed filled with the letters that make up the names of great Italian artists, philosophers and writers from every era, for example in the work 20 Siciliani of 1975 or Italia of 1975, which Salvo always follows up with his own, according to a creative strategy of self-affirmation. These are works that combine the exercise of a self-referential and subtly self-mocking conceptuality with the rediscovery of the practice of painting.

The second part of the exhibition project is devoted to the pictorial production initiated since the 1980s. Through a selection of paintings on canvas dated from 1983 to 2003, the exhibition focuses on the investigation conducted on the depiction 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 become central. Suspended between reality and imagination, city settings, often nocturnal, become a pretext for depicting the glimmers of light from street lamps, neon lights and cars that stand out against imposing buildings transformed into pure geometric solids, as for example in Periferia of 1986 or in the large painting Untitled of 1988, a glimpse of Florence in which Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women can be recognized.

“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 arrive at the definition of a new family of forms, a mental purification 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,” explains curator Gianluca Ranzi.

By placing these two cycles of works side by side, the exhibition becomes a journey through the artist’s Sicilies and urban daydreams.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Italian and English catalog that presents Salvo’s entire artistic journey along with books and exhibitions to date dedicated to the author.

For info: www.depart.it

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Image: Salvo, 45 Sicilians (1976; oil on panel, 100 x 119 cm)

Dep Art Gallery dedicates a monographic exhibition to Salvo on his Sicilies and cities

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