A splendid exhibition at Pinacoteca Agnelli brings one of Italy's best artists back to life

What do you make of a man who calls himself SALVO – short for Salvatore: THE SAVIOR? Who takes pictures of himself in the pose of Jesus Christ with a halo around his head, carves his name in capital letters on sleek marble slaps and paints himself as the dragon slaying Saint George in high renaissance style? Sounds like a narcissistic show-off type, no?

I have to admit I didn’t know much about the Italian artist Salvatore Mangione (1947-2015) before I went to see the eye-opening exhibition SALVO. Arrivare in Tempo in der Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin besuchte. Der 1947 in Leonforte, Sizilien, geborene Salvo war in den 60er Jahren eine treibende Kraft der Arte Povera-Bewegung in Turin und befreundet mit Giuseppe Penone, Alighiero Boetti und Robert Berry. In seiner anspielungsreichen Konzeptkunst, hauptsächlich Fotografien und skulpturale Arbeiten, beschäftigte er sich mit Formen der  Selbstdarstellung und Sprache. In seinen Autoritratti fotografierte er sich selbst als Renaissancemeister Raffael, in der Salvator-Mundi-Pose oder montierte sein Gesicht in andere ikonische Bilder. Er stellte auch seine Lapidi aus, Wortspiele und literarische Zitate auf massiven Marmortafeln, eine ausgefallene Materialwahl, wo seine Arte-Povera-Kollegen doch bewusst ärmliche Materialien wie Sackleinen, rostiges Metall oder Holzreste nutzten, um der Welt zu zeigen, dass Kunst mehr ist als eine schicke Ware.

You can tell Salvo wasn’t lacking self-esteem when he presented these works in the highly discursive climate of the late 60s. At a time when people protested against the Vietnam war and marched for Marxist ideas, he was demonstrating his intellectual independence. The exhibition proves Salvo was never a strict follower of the conceptualist dogma. With his works he was tapping into a longer and richer history of art. The marble headstones with ambiguous messages like PIU TEMPO IN MENO SPAZIO (More Time in Less Space) evoke classic Roman epitaphs. In the early 1970s Salvo was diverging even more from the progressive trends of his time and chose to devote himself exclusively to painting – a commitment he maintained for the next forty years. These lush paintings, mostly landscapes and cityscapes in bright shades of red, blue, yellow and pink, are at the center of the Torino show.

Rather than giving an encyclopedic overview, the show is organized in chapters that highlight some of the most important influences and obsessions that informed Salvo’s artistic practice. It starts with the reconstruction of two of Salvo’s most significant exhibitions in 1973: his solo exhibition at John Weber Gallery in New York, where he was still using a fully conceptual language, and his first exhibition dedicated exclusively to painting, at Galleria Toselli in Milan. In New York Salvo presented a group of his mockingly iconic photographic self-portraits. A few months later, at Galleria Toselli in Milan, he exhibited only one oil painting and a pastel on paper, entitled respectively San Giorgio e il drago and San Michele, both painted in 1973. San Giorgio e il drago und San Michele both painted in 1973.

The motif of the dragon slayer became an obsession. Again and again Salvo painted his versions of classic paintings by masters like Raphael, Carpaccio or Cosmé Tura. It was his way of fighting the constraints of conceptual orthodoxy. Or as he said himself: „In those years, to be really with it, a young artist had to exhibit in totally white cubes, with installations and works in which any use of color was banned. Whereas I felt, and still feel, the need to be a painter. [...] I will at least be credited with having made such a risky decision at a time when this sort of move was not tolerated. But then I have always had my suspicions about artists who never change.“

When he gave himself permission to paint again, no matter what his peers thought, the Djinn got out of the bottle. Salvo started with city scenes, the denizens of the night, men in dim lit sport bars, drinking, smoking, playing billiard, hanging out on street corners or riding on motorcycles. The paintings are moody, stylized, glowing with artificial light like theater sets. Or scenes from a cool Nouvelle Vague movie. Eventually the people vanish from his paintings. Cityscapes begin to look more like semi-abstract blocks of color fields. In the night scenes the physicality of light becomes the major theme. Glowing street lamps form cone-shaped objects in orange and pink. The headlights of street cars pierce the night with yellow beams. Salvo also finds inspiration in Gothic cathedrals and the landscapes of his youth in Sicily.

Curators Sarah Cosulich and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti have organized the show in thematic sections titled „Studio“, „Bar Sport“, „La Grande Sera“ and „Mediterranea“. The paintings are often grouped in dense clusters of similar looking motifs, an indication that Salvo painted certain scenes over and over again – and by doing so conceptualized his urge to put color on canvas. There is a whole set of paintings dedicated to the church of San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo, whose peculiar architecture combines Sicilian-Norman Romanic tradition with Arabic style. Salvo paints the multi-domed structure in sensuous hues of bright yellow and hot pink.

Woven into the visually striking presentation are personal anecdotes, letters, manuscripts, quick sketches by the artist that further help explain Salvo’s confident, multifaceted thinking. In 1969, when he wanted to catch the attention of Gian Enzo Sperone, one of the leading Italian gallerists, he copied a letter from Leonardo Da Vinci to his future patron Ludovico Sforza for his application to the gallery. The bold strategy worked. Sperone took Salvo under his wings, only to be fired by the artist a few years later with another stinging letter: „I can no longer endure your stale methods. The world is big and no one indispensable“, Salvo wrote.

He had no trouble finding other well-known galleries willing to represent him: Paul Maenz, Barbara Gladstone, Massimo Minini. Salvo participated in the 41st Venice Biennale, had museum exhibitions in Bologna, Essen, Rotterdam and New York. He published a widely read essay, Della Pintura. Imitazione di Wittgenstein, for which he imitated the writing style of the German philosopher for his reflections on art and the conceptual nature of painting. Since Salvo's death in 2015, there have been numerous initiatives to highlight his importance in both the Italian and international cultural landscape. His work has been cited as a major influence on a generation of new figurative painters such as Nicolas Party, a comparison that seems obvious at first glance. Yet Salvo has always been at odds with the contemporary art scene. A passionate individualist, he did not cater to the trends of the art market, kept his distance from the fashion-driven timelines of his colleagues and preferred to deal with the timeless questions of art history. He painted because he had to, put ideas on canvas, chased light and color.

That's why Arrivare in tempo - Arriving on time initially sounds anachronistic for a Salvo exhibition. The longer I look at his work though, the more fitting the title seems. Not only because the exhibition celebrates an unconventional artist whose independent artistic practice seems particularly significant today. "Arriving on time" could actually be Salvo's motto, his secret driving force, the ultimate saying on one of his marble tablets. There is also a nice anecdote: In search of the right light, Salvo is said to have often raced towards the sunset in his car. On one of these trips he caused a car accident. His explanation for this: he had to drive fast so as not to miss the right moment. Arrivare in tempo! Arriving on time for the perfect light.

Salvo. Arrivare in tempo is on view until 25.05.2025 at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Torino, Italy.