Collection: Salvo (Salvatore Mangione)

(Leonforte 1947 - Turin 2015)

Salvo, the pseudonym of Salvatore Mangione, was an Italian artist whose work was characterized by a constant relationship with the past and the history of culture.
Born in Leonforte, in 1956 he moved with his family to Turin, which became his adopted city. After returning from a stay in Paris in 1968, he began to associate with artists involved in Arte Povera, who found their reference point in the gallery of Gian Enzo Sperone – among them Alighiero Boetti, who became his friend, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and critics Renato Barilli, Germano Celant, and Achille Bonito Oliva.
From the early 1960s, he painted and supported himself by selling inexpensive portraits, landscapes, and copies of works by Rembrandt and Vincent Van Gogh. He also engaged in photographic work and created marble plaques inscribed with words or phrases: works that, although developed in the context of Arte Povera, displayed a peculiar and pioneering character in their monumental and archaizing connotations, foreshadowing his future research.
In 1973, a pivotal year, he returned to painting and never abandoned it again, recovering traditional techniques. The quotation of ancient works did not imply mere copying, but a reinterpretation in a simplified key, where the artist sometimes inserted himself through the process of self-portraiture.
From 1976, he developed a series of landscapes in which he depicted, with vibrant colors, knights among architectural ruins and visions of classical columns, seen at various times of day and night. Between late 1979 and 1980, he painted other landscapes featuring country houses, churches, and monuments, where trees inspired by Giotto and previously almost nonexistent vegetation appeared. In the following years, his painting turned to the subject of plains, introducing a new perspective in his landscapes. He spent a lot of time in Costigliole d’Asti, between Langhe and Monferrato, whose hilly landscapes were reflected in his more recent works.
Salvo's aquatints consistently explore the themes of painting: the same hilly landscapes, the same lights suspended between day and night, the same ability to construct an image that always seems on the verge of becoming a memory. The aquatint works through acid etching on separate plates, one for each color, printed in sequence: a technique that yields softness and chromatic depth, and which in Salvo's hands produced sheets where the light seemed to settle on the paper with the same gentleness with which it settled on the hills.