Salvo (1947–2015), born Salvatore Mangione in Leonforte, Sicily, was an Italian artist whose career traversed conceptual art, appropriation and a distinctive reinvention of painting rooted in historical memory. After moving to Turin in the late 1950s, he became associated with the Arte Povera milieu, forging early connections with figures such as Alighiero Boetti and Michelangelo Pistoletto. His earliest works from the late 1960s reflect a rigorous conceptual impulse: textual statements engraved in marble, self-referential photographs and ironic acts of self-mythologising that placed him at the heart of Italian postmodern experimentation.
By the early 1970s, however, Salvo made a radical return to painting. This turn was not a retreat but a provocation. Embracing the format and iconography of historical genres — landscape, history painting portraiture — he created luminous, stylised scenes that merged classical perspective with anachronistic elements and vivid, almost hallucinatory colour. Influenced by De Chirico’s metaphysical spaces and the clarity of Renaissance painting, Salvo forged an idiosyncratic visual language that was both nostalgic and defiantly artificial.
His landscapes — featuring cypress trees, classical ruins and imagined cities — evoke a sense of suspended time, offering a pictorial realm shaped as much by memory and cultural residue as by observation. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, these works grew increasingly fantastical, positioning Salvo as both inheritor and satirist of Italy’s pictorial heritage.
Long underappreciated outside Italy, his work has undergone significant reassessment in recent years, with major institutional retrospectives and inclusion in surveys of postmodern figuration.
SALVO (1947-2015)
Il Ponte (The Bridge)
SALVO (1947-2015)
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SALVO (1947-2015)
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SALVO (1947-2015)
(i)-(iii) Untitled
SALVO (1947-2015)
Il giorno fu pieno di lampi la sera verranno le stelle (The day was full of lightning in the evening stars will come out)
SALVO (1947-2015)
San Nicola Arcella
SALVO (1947-2015)
La Valle
SALVO (1947-2015)
Primavera (Spring)
SALVO (1947-2015)
Primavera
SALVO (1947-2015)
Untitled
SALVO (1947-2015)
Untitled
薩爾沃 (1947-2015)
下雪的日子
Salvo (1947-2015)
Sans titre
SALVO (1947-2015)
Tenerife
Salvo (1947-2015)
Senza titolo
Salvo (1947-2015)
Senza titolo
Salvo (1947-2015)
Senza titolo
Salvo (1947-2015)
Giugno
Salvo (1947-2015)
La valle
SALVO (1947-2015)
Inverno (Winter)
薩沃爾 (1947-2015)
波士尼亞赫塞哥維納
SALVO (1947-2015)
Strada con quattro lampioni (Street with Four Street Lamps)
Salvo (1947-2015)
Inverno
SALVO (1947-2015)
Djerba
Salvo (1947-2015)
Prima Primavera
Salvo (1947-2015)
Il Porto
SALVO (1947-2015)
Untitled
SALVO (1947-2015)
Ottobre
SALVO (1947-2015)
Primavera
Salvo (1947-2015)
Tozeur
SALVO (1947-2015)
Paesaggio (Landscape)
SALVO (1947-2015)
Ottomania
SALVO (1947-2015)
Case con Lampione (Houses with Lamppost)
SALVO (NÉ EN 1947)
Un soir (una sera)
Salvo (1947-2015)
Primavera
Salvo (1947-2015)
Sant'Anna
Salvo (N. 1947)
Luci e luna
Salvo (1947-2015)
Sans titre
SALVO (1947-2015)
Shahr-e Sabz
SALVO (1947-2015)
Val d’Itri
Salvo (1947-2015)
Sans titre
Salvo (1947-2015)
Untitled
Salvo (N. 1947)
Notte, strada, lampione
SALVO (NÉ EN 1947)
Aprile
Salvo (b. 1947)
Untitled
Salvo (1947-2015)
Sans titre