Collection: Salvo (Salvatore Mangione)

(Leonforte 1947 - Turin 2015)

Salvo, pseudonym of Salvatore Mangione, is an Italian artist whose works and research are characterized by tendencies such as the search for the self, narcissistic self-satisfaction, the relationship with the past and with the history of culture. In some of his works, in fact, the artist inserts his own face with photomontages on images taken from newspapers and transcribes copies of novels in which he puts his own name in place of that of the protagonists (for example Salvo in Wonderland by Carroll).
Born in Sicily, he moved with his family to Turin, which became his adopted city and where he frequented the artists who worked in the Arte Povera movement. From the early 1960s he painted and supported himself by selling portraits, landscapes and copies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh at low prices.
He also works in photography and creates marble tombstones on which words or phrases are engraved; these are works that, although developed in the context of Arte Povera, show in their monumental and archaic connotations a peculiar character and precursor of his future research.
In 1973, the year of the turning point, he returned to painting and never abandoned it again, with the recovery of traditional techniques. The citation of ancient works does not imply a simple copy but a remake in a simplified way, where the artist sometimes inserts himself with the process of self-portraiture.
Since 1976 he has been developing a series of landscapes in which he proposes, with bright colors, knights among architectural ruins and visions of classical columns, seen at various times of the day and night. Between the end of 1979 and 1980 he painted a series of landscapes with country houses, churches and monuments, in which Giotto-inspired trees and previously almost non-existent vegetation appear. In the following years his painting turns to the subject of the plains, introducing a new perspective cut in his landscapes. He spends a lot of time in Costigliole d'Asti, between Langhe and Monferrato, whose hilly landscapes are found in his recent works.
There are countless exhibitions dedicated to him in galleries and museums around the world.