Salvo's light-drenched dreamscapes shine in Seoul

Installation view of "Salvo, in Viaggio" at Gladstone Gallery Seoul / Courtesy of Archivio Salvo and Gladstone

Like many young Italian artists in the late 1960s, Salvo (1947-2015), born Salvatore Mangione, initially found himself drawn to Arte Povera — the country’s radical avant-garde movement that favored everyday materials and a deliberately anti-establishment approach to art-making.

But a few years on, he sensed that the movement had hardened into a new kind of fashion.

“In those years, in the galleries, you could find horses and stones, but not colorful paintings,” recalled Norma Mangione, the late artist’s daughter. “He thought maybe it’s more revolutionary to paint colorful places.”

And so, in 1973, he found his way back to the brush and never put it down again.

The saturated landscapes that followed now fill Gladstone Gallery in southern Seoul, where “Salvo, in Viaggio (Salvo Traveling)” marks the Italian master’s first solo exhibition in Korea.

Organized in collaboration with Archivio Salvo, a nonprofit founded by the artist’s wife and daughter, the show gathers radiant works spanning from 1988 to 2015, the year of his death.

Installation view of "Salvo, in Viaggio" at Gladstone Gallery Seoul / Courtesy of Archivio Salvo and Gladstone

Salvo’s landscapes, inspired by his frequent travels across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and Asia, appear distinctly fantastical, even quietly spiritual.

The world he conjures is not a straightforward representation of what he observed, but a re-enchanted vision of it. Architectural forms — Roman columns, Egyptian obelisks, mosques, archaeological ruins and Mediterranean beach houses — are distilled into blocky silhouettes.

Nature, too, is transformed: bulbous clouds and balloon-like trees emerge in vivid, almost edible color. And shadows are never painted black, but tinted with the hues of whatever surrounds the object casting them.

Salvo's "Una Sera" (1994) / Courtesy of Archivio Salvo and Gladstone

But it’s the sky that casts the real spell. Its colors shift and melt into one another, as in “Una Sera,” where a brilliant yellow fades into lavender and soft peach at the horizon. You can almost feel the warmth of the light that bathes the vista in its soft glow.

“In his landscapes, you can see the different moments of the year, the seasons and also the different moments of the day. The light is the real subject,” Mangione said. “What I think is very important in his work is his use of many different shades to create the effect of light … He wanted to represent some magical moments you could really see in nature, in the world.”

Salvo’s scenes read like fragments of nostalgic memory — not landscapes you’d step into directly, but ones you might drift through in a dream, just before waking.

The exhibition includes “Khiva,” a luminous depiction of the city in Uzbekistan the artist never visited in life but only dreamed of. It was brought to life in the final year before his death.

“In that year, he painted some special subjects — places he had never been, but would love to be,” Mangione noted with a smile. “So it was, in a way, a desire, a dream. For me, it’s very special.”

“Salvo, in Viaggio” runs through July 12.