The Baron in the Trees: Works by Salvo

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As Andrea Bruciati notes: “Salvo’s willful naiveté of drawing and color in his references allows for an understanding of the transference that results from history: the dense material heaviness of museum painting becomes transformed in his lighter and airier approach, and transferred to a more spiritual level. The artist returns to more 'primitive' painting with nods to various masters—Cosmé Tura, Carpaccio, Paolo Uccello, Rafael of the Nazarenes, and Carrà—taking care that his smooth, distinct forms are painted with flat, unreal colors that evoke the palette of cartoons or comics. (...). Salvo’s apparent naiveté is the result of a relentless quest; it is the work of a master who has learned simplicity, not one who has learned to evade complexity. (...) In his production of the last decade the artist has been intent on summarizing and re-cataloging literally all the subjects he visited previously: the industrial suburbs, minarets, nocturnal images, and exotic and everyday landscapes. He has focused on reproduction, transcription, and duplication as a means of finding, evoking, and preserving himself in a process of unabashed self-quotation leading towards self-knowledge. At the same time his paintings are a sort of childish tantrum in which he wants to hear and see, again and again, the same story, or go inside an interminable pictorial image as if something were not quite explored and shown. They are painted with an incandescence never yet seen, and increasingly protracted risk, as they move towards the absolutely essential."