Salvo - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Salvo’s Al mattino, 2004, encapsulates the artist’s obsession with light and the passage of time. Rendering a fantastical sunrise and its gradient atmospheric effect, Salvo captures a village undergoing a metamorphosis. While the rising sun is outside the pictorial plane, the landscape shows dawn’s long shadows and dappled yellow light over the landscape. Like Monet, Salvo treats light as an expressive medium. However, while Monet was fascinated by the science of optics and perception, Salvo’s observations of space are more interested in nostalgia and recollection, offering visual meditations on the psychological encounter with place. Salvo imbues his idyllic landscapes with the radiance of memory—they are remembered places, perfectly tranquil in nature. As he writes “For me painting soon acquired a relation with reality, though always filtered by memory.”i

     

    Salvo (née Salvatore Mangione) was born in 1947 in Leonforte, a small Sicilian commune. He began his artistic career in Turin as an Italian Modernist, participating in the Arte Povera movement throughout the 1960s and encountering artists such as Alighieri Boetti and Gilberto Zorio. Figures in the movement placed increasing emphasis on creating art without the limitations and historical weight of traditional practices and materials. Salvo’s experience with avant-garde sculpture and photography colored his return to figurative painting in 1973, with his oeuvre maintaining a strong conceptual valence. His paintings are influenced by Giorgio de Chirico, who began the Metaphysical art movement and advocated for a return to figurative art. De Chirico sought to combine reality with unexpected elements to elicit psychological responses, such as nostalgia and estrangement, employing lightness and colorism.ii

     

    Giorgio de Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image: Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-38, Artwork:  © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

    In 1976, Salvo began his series of wonderfully bright and colorful landscapes. His compositions use a painterly mannerism, employing simplified geometric forms and heightened colors to capture the appearance of a dreamlike memory. Al mattino is characteristically surreal in its fantastical elements: the perfectly planar edifices bear neither doors nor windows, the foliage and mountains are dramatically candy-colored, and the clouds appear in intense pastel hues. With its expressive light and artificial color, Al mattino is not a recreation of nature but rather a mental image. The scene unfolds with the sublimity of a fond memory. The affection the artist conveys for the setting is palpable in the aureate glow which suffuses the painting—a glow which permeates the forms that seemingly emit an inner radiance. Just as the sun illumines the physical environment, the mind bestows a warm glow over the inner psychological landscape. Part-real and part-idealized, the painted landscape occupies that specific juncture between past and present, between night and day, where the effects of light and memory awash the world in a magical luminescence.

      

    i Salvo in Luca Cerizza, “Salvo Autogrill, 2020” Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, March 2020, online

    ii Renato Barilli, “Italian Art in the 1920s and 1970s: Affinities and Differences,” Center for Italian Art, July 14, 2020, online

306

Al mattino

signed and titled ""Al mattino" Salvo" on the reverse
oil on canvas
39 3/8 x 51 1/8 in. (100 x 130 cm)
Painted in 2004, this work is registered in the Archivio Salvo, Turin, under the number S2004-65 and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Archivio Salvo, Turin.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024