Sicilies and cities of Salvo on display at Dep Art Gallery

Entitled SALVO. Sicilies and Cities the exhibition running until January 28, 2023 at Dep Art Gallery dedicated to Salvo (Leonforte, 1947 - Turin, 2015), stage name for Salvatore Mangione. Curated by Gianluca Ranzi, the exhibition focuses on two moments of the artist’s production: the Sicilies and Italies of the 1970s and the theme of the city, represented by a series of paintings between 1983 and 2003.

This is the fourth monographic exhibition that the Milan gallery dedicates to the artist, with which it intends to focus on his rarest production, that is, the moment of his return 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, light rendering and chromatic sensitivity, and on the other hand his personal reinterpretation of the classical pictorial tradition.

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

In contrast, the second part of the exhibition is devoted to the pictorial production that began in the 1980s and in particular to the depiction of the city in paintings on canvas between 1983 and 2003. In these paintings, 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, the city settings, often nocturnal, become a pretext for representing 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, where a glimpse of Florence is portrayed 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 eclectic and cultured vision of theartist, combining reality with dreams, architectural solidity with the enigmas of light, topographical objectivity with subjective poetic invention,” the curator explains.

Accompanying the exhibition is a bilingual catalog in Italian and English that delves into Salvo’s entire artistic journey along with books and exhibitions to date dedicated to him.

For info: https://www.depart.it/

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

Sicilies and cities of Salvo on display at Dep Art Gallery

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