SALVO (Leonforte 1947 – Torino 2015)

Salvatore Mangione, born in the province of Enna in 1947, moved with his family to Turin in 1956, where he approached painting. In 1968, he began to frequent the group of young artists who gravitated in the sphere of Arte Povera and found Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery as a point of reference. He met, among others, Boetti, Merz, Zorio, Penone, and the critics Germano Celant, Renato Barilli and Achille Bonito Oliva. His early works already reveal certain tendencies that would later characterise his artistic career: the search for the self, the relationship with the past and with cultural history. In the series 12 self-portraits, he photomontages his own face on images taken from newspapers: these photographs are presented in 1970 at the Sperone gallery. In the same year, in parallel with the photographic works, he produced the series of tombstones, which continued until 1972. In 1973, a decisive artistic turning point took place, in the sense of a return to painting and traditional techniques, in the series of his d'après, which had already begun in the 1970s, aimed at revisiting art history in a naive and simplified key. In 1976 he took part in the Venice Biennale with Il Trionfo di San Giorgio (from Carpaccio) and inaugurated a new moment in his research: a series of landscapes featured, initially with a simplified scheme and then with bright colours, knights among architectural ruins and visions of classical columns. In 1984, at the invitation of Maurizio Calvesi, he participated in "Arte allo specchio", as part of the XLI Venice Biennale. From this same period is the Ottomanie series, in which the suggestions of his recent trip to Yugoslavia and Turkey are translated into the representation of minarets, captured in the essentiality of their architecture and placed in imaginary cities, or in mysterious nocturnal landscapes.

In 2000, he produced a colour litho-serigraphy entitled October for the Guastalla Gallery.