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Thursday 6 February

Salvo: The Painter Who Reinvented Light

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: what you need to understand about Salvatore Mangione, known as Salvo (1947–2015), is that he was one of the most subversive artists of his generation. While you were swooning over monochromes and minimalist conceptual installations in 1973, he, this Sicilian genius exiled in Turin, had the supreme audacity to return to figurative painting. Yes, you heard that right, painting! That thing you considered dead and buried, that practice you deemed obsolete, he resurrected it with a masterful insolence that left you all speechless.

The story begins in 1960s Turin, that industrial city in northern Italy where young Salvo arrived from his native Sicily. At the time, he made a living by selling copies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, learning his craft in the humility of a copyist. But make no mistake, this was not due to a lack of originality. It was a conscious strategy, a way of appropriating the history of art to better subvert it later. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his theses on history, the past is not a bygone time but an active force capable of disrupting the continuum of history.

Initially, Salvo asserted himself as the artist of radical decentering. Between 1968 and 1972, during the heyday of Arte Povera, he shared a studio with Alighiero Boetti and mingled with all the revolutionary figures of the Italian avant-garde: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone. But while his contemporaries sought to deconstruct the art object, Salvo tackled the very figure of the artist. His photographic self-portraits, where he posed as Raphael or a saint blessing the crowd, were not mere narcissistic provocations. They were acts of semiotic guerrilla warfare, to borrow Umberto Eco’s terms, détournements that exposed the absurdity of the heroic postures of the modern artist.

The marble plaques on which he engraved “Io sono il migliore” (I am the best) or “Salvo è vivo” (Salvo is alive) functioned as performative statements questioning the very status of the artist in society. It is no coincidence that these works emerged just as Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author. Salvo pushed the logic to its breaking point: if the author is dead, then the artist can become anyone— a saint, a hero, even a Cuban revolutionary.

But it was in his second phase, starting in 1973, that Salvo truly became revolutionary. His decision to return to figurative painting was an act of cultural resistance of unparalleled audacity. At a time when conceptual art reigned supreme and painting was considered an outdated bourgeois practice, Salvo affirmed the possibility of a critical painting, a figuration that was not a mere nostalgic regression but a radical reinvention of our relationship with the visible.

His landscapes with electric colors, his urban views bathed in an unreal light, his compositions that seem to emerge from a hallucinatory dream were slaps in the face of dominant taste. Jacques Rancière would likely see in this approach a genuine redistribution of the sensible, a way of reinventing our relationship with the visible by creating images that are both familiar and deeply strange.

Take his nocturnal landscapes of the 1980s and 1990s. These are not mere picturesque views but profound explorations of temporality and perception. The unreal tones he used— electric blues, phosphorescent pinks, acidic yellows— created a visual tension that challenged our habitual perception of reality. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that painting is not a window onto the world but a way of showing how things become things and the world becomes world. Salvo pushed this logic to its most extreme limits.

In his views of the Po Valley, his panoramas of the Monferrato hills, his Sicilian landscapes, nature is transfigured by a light that exists nowhere in nature. The trees seem frozen in mineral immobility, the architectures acquire a ghostly presence. This is what Martin Heidegger would call the unveiling of being, the capacity of art to reveal truth not as conformity to reality but as the emergence of a new world.

Salvo created images that are both rooted in tradition and radically contemporary. His urban landscapes, with their deceptively naive perspectives and impossible colors, speak of a modernity we all know but never truly see. Walter Benjamin would have recognized in these images dialectics at a standstill, moments where time crystallizes into a configuration charged with tension. The deserted streets, empty squares, and solitary architectures become emblems of a contemporary condition where the sublime has migrated to the margins of the everyday.

His incessant travels— to Afghanistan with Boetti, then to Greece, Turkey, Syria, Oman, Tibet, Iceland— nourished a vision of the landscape that transcended the local to reach the universal. Each place became under his brush a metaphysical theater where the drama of perception unfolded. The minarets of Istanbul, the Muslim graves of Sarajevo, the Icelandic mountains were transformed by a light that seemed to come from another world. This light, Salvo worked exclusively with electricity, rejecting natural light to better create his hallucinatory effects.

In 1986, he published “Della Pittura”, a treatise in 238 points inspired by Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”. It was not a traditional manifesto but an attempt to think of painting as an autonomous language capable of creating its own rules and logic. As Theodor Adorno wrote, the most radical art is that which maintains its capacity to create meaning while resisting recuperation by the dominant system.

The ottomanie, those landscapes where minarets are reduced to their simplest geometric expression, marked a new stage in his exploration. This neologism he invented demonstrates his ability to create not only images but also concepts. These architectures, simplified to the extreme and bathed in an unreal light, become pure signs, hieroglyphs of a personal visual alphabet.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Salvo intensified his chromatic research. His views of plains, a new theme in his work, became opportunities to explore the limits of perception. The flatness of the landscape became a screen onto which he projected chromatic variations of hallucinatory intensity. These works echoed Josef Albers’s studies on color interaction but transported them into the realm of figuration.

The last years of his life were marked by a return to certain themes abandoned for over thirty years: a large Italia, a Sicilia, a Bar. But this return was not a repetition: each motif was reinvented, transformed by three decades of pictorial exploration. As Gilles Deleuze wrote, repetition is never the return of the same but the production of difference.

Salvo’s practice shows us that tradition can be the vehicle for the greatest novelty. By choosing to paint at a time when it seemed anachronistic, he was not being conservative but radically innovative. He demonstrated that painting could still be a tool for critical thought, a way of questioning our relationship with the visible world. Rancière would describe this as a “distribution of the sensible”, redefining what is visible, sayable, and thinkable in a given society.

If you still don’t understand why Salvo is one of the most important artists of his generation, it’s because you are still prisoners of your modernist prejudices. He had the courage to return to painting when everyone else declared it dead, and he did so not out of conservatism but pure radicality. He showed us that tradition is not a dead weight but a living force capable of transforming our present. And that, you bunch of snobs, is a lesson you would do well to meditate on while standing before his incandescent paintings.

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