SALVO
IO SONO SALVO
November 25, 2023 to January 13, 2024
° ° ° ° °
Excerpt from the catalog text Di Salvo e Della Pittura by Bob Nickas:
Forty years have passed since Salvo composed Della Pittura, an essay on painting presented in book form, a publication modest in size but far-reaching in its inquiry and ambition. After all that time it remains relevant, equally if not more so today. As times and tastes change, certain styles of painting are in and out of favor, and painting itself comes into contention, as it has in the past, while dominant today. To debate the activity of picture-making, which represents Art with a capital A, the basic questions surrounding the creative act are inevitably raised, never meant to be definitively resolved. Art and its discourse encompass an ongoing, parallel investigation. Doesn’t one make a work of art to understand what’s been done? Doesn’t one write about art to the same end? Conceived in 1980, written over the course of about two years’ time, the completed manuscript for Della Pittura is dated May 1982. When copies were at last in hand, it would be 1986. By then, much had changed for an artist who had made what was, for others, a surprising departure, but for him may have signaled an arrival, and, with expectation, more to follow. There had been major changes in the art world since Salvo’s debut in 1970. It was larger, for one thing, less doctrinaire, open to art in diverse forms,
particularly those previously dismissed. Salvo’s work was no longer as controversial, debated as it once was, having prefigured a return to painting, followed by successive returns since the 1980s, and with his practice securely established. He had made a fairly swift transition in the early to mid-1970s from conceptual, language-oriented pieces and photo-based works to painting, with his subjects drawn from art history, mythology, archaeology. These works likely appeared perverse, confounding at that time. At first gently rendered with great finesse, as if history was a faint trace of itself, then more casually defined, the artist embracing an intentional awkwardness which would be gradually refined toward the highly stylized forms and chromatics immediately recognizable as his own, Salvo found his way forward.
Between 1969 and 1973, Salvo announced himself with his name inscribed in marble, painted, printed, and illuminated in neon, in photographs with his face superimposed on those of figures both recognizable and everyday, and as his own photographic subject, creating parts to perform. From the late 1970s onward, a work by Salvo would register and be “signed” on the level of the image alone, always painted. In retrospect, following the artist’s path from idea-based works, alternately serious and mischievous, to those traditionally pictorial and accumulating in profusion, we can identify a position that was iconoclastic from the start, from beginning to end. Not only can connections be made between works that outwardly appear irreconcilable, and despite having been made decades apart, but in looking back we understand that this artist’s concerns and motives are manifest within a particular triangulation: cerebral, visual, literary. What writers and readers have in common with painters is that they think in terms of images. Otherwise there is little chance for the characters and the scenes to come to life in the mind’s eye. What the reader imagines may differ from what the writer intended. What the painter imagines is fully evident. In these parallels, we ask, when an artist shifts from word to image, as relatively few have done, is there a discontinuity? This is not necessarily true for Salvo. His other triangulation, and key to understanding how conceptualism had not
been left behind, is that we see with the eyes, the mind, and memory. In Della Pittura, he asks, “When you dream and see the face of your friend—clear, precise in its characteristics— with what do you see, with your eyes?” [45] The mind processes what has been seen, with memory as its filter. Salvo’s picture-making, and surely all that came before, was “towards consciousness and its expression.” [185]
Nero Editions: Io Sono Salvo. Works and Writings 1961-2015, 2023, Turin 2023
Photos © Marjorie Brunet Plaza
° °
L’uomo che spaccò la statua del dio, 1972
Marble plaque, engraved
45 x 65 x 1,9 cm / 17.7 x 25.6 x 0.7 in
La tartaruga e l'aquila, 1972
Marble plaque, engraved
45 x 65 x 1,9 cm / 17.7 x 25.6 x 0.7 in
Untitled (Tricolore), 1973
Spray paint on newspaper
(»La Stampa« from 11.09.1973)
58,8 x 85,2 cm / 22.8 x 33.5 in
77 pittori italiani, 1975
Oil paint and chalk on masonite
106 x 88 cm / 41.7 x 34.6 in
37 Siciliani, 1976
Colored crayon on paper
24 x 33 cm / 9.5 x 13 in
Letter to Gian Enzo Sperone along the lines of Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico Il Moro, 1969
facsimile
Vangelo, 1970
Handwritten book
(according to the Gospel of Mark) Ink on lined paper
Cover made of green linen
31 x 21,3 cm / 12.2 x 8.2 in
° °
Le tre foglie verdi („C’era una volta un uomo tanto povero…; Allora il figliuolo,
che si chiamava Salvo, gli disse…“), 1969
Handwritten book
Ink on lined paper (38 p.)
Cover made of blue linen
20,9 x 15,5 cm / 7.8 x 5.8 in
° °
Il mio nome più grande degli altri, 1972
Harald Szeemann (ed.), documenta 5. Befragung der Realität. Bildwelten Heute, Exhibition catalogue
Untitled (Tricolore), 1972
Edizioni Toselli, Milano
(Exhibition catalogue with black and white images of works by Boetti, Fabro, Merz and Paolini)
29,5 x 20,5 cm / 11.6 x 7.8 in
Maura, 1978
Oil on book
21 x 16 x 3 cm / 8.2 x 6.2 x 1.1 in
SALVO - Della Pittura, 1980
(Italian, English and German)
(by Paul Maenz & Gerd de Vries in 1986)
Sette incisioni e sette poesie, 1983
Nine folding panels
(one title, seven printed poems and one etching for each poem, imprint)
each 24,8 x 17 cm / 9.5 x 6.7 in
SALVO
IO SONO SALVO
November 25, 2023 to January 13, 2024
° ° ° ° °
Excerpt from the catalog text Di Salvo e Della Pittura by Bob Nickas:
Forty years have passed since Salvo composed Della Pittura, an essay on painting presented in book form, a publication modest in size but far-reaching in its inquiry and ambition. After all that time it remains relevant, equally if not more so today. As times and tastes change, certain styles of painting are in and out of favor, and painting itself comes into contention, as it has in the past, while dominant today. To debate the activity of picture-making, which represents Art with a capital A, the basic questions surrounding the creative act are inevitably raised, never meant to be definitively resolved. Art and its discourse encompass an ongoing, parallel investigation. Doesn’t one make a work of art to understand what’s been done? Doesn’t one write about art to the same end? Conceived in 1980, written over the course of about two years’ time, the completed manuscript for Della Pittura is dated May 1982. When copies were at last in hand, it would be 1986. By then, much had changed for an artist who had made what was, for others, a surprising departure, but for him may have signaled an arrival, and, with expectation, more to follow. There had been major changes in the art world since Salvo’s debut in 1970. It was larger, for one thing, less doctrinaire, open to art in diverse forms,
particularly those previously dismissed. Salvo’s work was no longer as controversial, debated as it once was, having prefigured a return to painting, followed by successive returns since the 1980s, and with his practice securely established. He had made a fairly swift transition in the early to mid-1970s from conceptual, language-oriented pieces and photo-based works to painting, with his subjects drawn from art history, mythology, archaeology. These works likely appeared perverse, confounding at that time. At first gently rendered with great finesse, as if history was a faint trace of itself, then more casually defined, the artist embracing an intentional awkwardness which would be gradually refined toward the highly stylized forms and chromatics immediately recognizable as his own, Salvo found his way forward.
Between 1969 and 1973, Salvo announced himself with his name inscribed in marble, painted, printed, and illuminated in neon, in photographs with his face superimposed on those of figures both recognizable and everyday, and as his own photographic subject, creating parts to perform. From the late 1970s onward, a work by Salvo would register and be “signed” on the level of the image alone, always painted. In retrospect, following the artist’s path from idea-based works, alternately serious and mischievous, to those traditionally pictorial and accumulating in profusion, we can identify a position that was iconoclastic from the start, from beginning to end. Not only can connections be made between works that outwardly appear irreconcilable, and despite having been made decades apart, but in looking back we understand that this artist’s concerns and motives are manifest within a particular triangulation: cerebral, visual, literary. What writers and readers have in common with painters is that they think in terms of images. Otherwise there is little chance for the characters and the scenes to come to life in the mind’s eye. What the reader imagines may differ from what the writer intended. What the painter imagines is fully evident. In these parallels, we ask, when an artist shifts from word to image, as relatively few have done, is there a discontinuity? This is not necessarily true for Salvo. His other triangulation, and key to understanding how conceptualism had not
been left behind, is that we see with the eyes, the mind, and memory. In Della Pittura, he asks, “When you dream and see the face of your friend—clear, precise in its characteristics— with what do you see, with your eyes?” [45] The mind processes what has been seen, with memory as its filter. Salvo’s picture-making, and surely all that came before, was “towards consciousness and its expression.” [185]
Nero Editions: Io Sono Salvo. Works and Writings 1961-2015, 2023, Turin 2023
Photos © Marjorie Brunet Plaza
° °
L’uomo che spaccò la statua del dio, 1972
Marble plaque, engraved
45 x 65 x 1,9 cm / 17.7 x 25.6 x 0.7 in
La tartaruga e l'aquila, 1972
Marble plaque, engraved
45 x 65 x 1,9 cm / 17.7 x 25.6 x 0.7 in
Untitled (Tricolore), 1973
Spray paint on newspaper
(»La Stampa« from 11.09.1973)
58,8 x 85,2 cm / 22.8 x 33.5 in
77 pittori italiani, 1975
Oil paint and chalk on masonite
106 x 88 cm / 41.7 x 34.6 in
37 Siciliani, 1976
Colored crayon on paper
24 x 33 cm / 9.5 x 13 in
Letter to Gian Enzo Sperone along the lines of Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico Il Moro, 1969
facsimile
° °
Vangelo, 1970
Handwritten book
(according to the Gospel of Mark) Ink on lined paper
Cover made of green linen
31 x 21,3 cm / 12.2 x 8.2 in
° °
Le tre foglie verdi („C’era una volta un uomo tanto povero…; Allora il figliuolo,
che si chiamava Salvo, gli disse…“), 1969
Handwritten book
Ink on lined paper (38 p.)
Cover made of blue linen
20,9 x 15,5 cm / 7.8 x 5.8 in
Il mio nome più grande degli altri, 1972
Harald Szeemann (ed.), documenta 5. Befragung der Realität. Bildwelten Heute, Exhibition catalogue
Untitled (Tricolore), 1972
Edizioni Toselli, Milano
(Exhibition catalogue with black and white images of works by Boetti, Fabro, Merz and Paolini)
29,5 x 20,5 cm / 11.6 x 7.8 in
Maura, 1978
Oil on book
21 x 16 x 3 cm / 8.2 x 6.2 x 1.1 in
SALVO - Della Pittura, 1980
(Italian, English and German)
(by Paul Maenz & Gerd de Vries in 1986)
Sette incisioni e sette poesie, 1983
Nine folding panels
(one title, seven printed poems and one etching for each poem, imprint)
each 24,8 x 17 cm / 9.5 x 6.7 in