Remo Salvadori

At the beginning of the 1970s, Remo Salvadori ’s work involved the positioning of photographs and everyday objects in space to reinterpret philosophical concepts, archetypal figures, or figures linked to mythology. The artist ’s main point of reference is space, which he interprets as a source of creative psychic energy so that even his studio becomes a theme within the work itself and is transfigured into the spiritual resonances that typify the environments and objects in his work. The recurrent geometrical forms in Salvadori ’s work are symbolic interpretations of existential states of being and of cosmic entities (the square, an element of stability belonging to the earth; the circle, evoking the cosmos and transcendence);the artist interrogates these recurring images and their range of possible meanings. Thus Remo Salvadori ’s work arises out of a will to influence the perception of a work of art by placing it in relationship to the “interior sonority ” of the space within which it is created. La stanza delle tazze (The Room of the Cups),1985 –86,is an installation made up of eight elements, in the form of cups, arranged on the wall. The orbital positions of the elements allude to the sign of infinity, dizzyingly extending the space of the environment. The cup, like other types of containers that appear in Salvadori ’s work, is adopted as a tangible, daily, and yet alchemical element, capable of attesting to the desire for contact and exchange between self and others. “I see the cup,” the artist says,“ as the possibility of moving from an illusory two-dimensional condition, to a multi-dimensional reality.” In canvas on copper, the eight elements are worked with wax and pigments, which include the primary colors —red, yellow, blue —and gold, white, black, green, and peach. The work Lampada (Lamp), 1988 –89,is presented as nine elements, each consisting of a sheet of paper placed diagonally. Each sheet has at its center a bronze ring containing a watercolor, with a central yellow area surrounded by a blue area. The figure of the circle is indicated by the bronze ring, which seems to be the pivot about which each element rotates. The physical nature of the ring as a relief element gives the work the prominence of a sculpture. The color denotes immateriality and light, and the work is based on the relationship between sculpture (which compresses the luminous flow of color and thus accentuates its irradiation)and a kindling of light. A relationship is also stated between bronze as an element of fire (metal is melted to give it form)and watercolor painting. Watercolor painting is a marriage between color and water. The almost immaterial substance of which it is made conveys the idea of light, of color and light as vibration and sublimation of the material. The nine elements that make up the work also relate to the nine different places where each one was created. Therefore each element produces a different degree of luminosity because it refers to a different moment and place. Even the chosen colors, blue and yellow, are complementary to one another. Yellow as a centrifugal force finds its opposite principle in the centripetal force of the blue, an element of balance. This choice of colors, as in the preceding work, recalls the theories of the anthroposophist Rudolph Steiner, who reexamined and expanded Goethe ’s color theory.
Salvadori ’s work is based on the idea of overcoming principles of opposition, taken from his view of anthroposophy as an personal discipline, which can be expressed in art in order to
achieve a spiritual perception of reality.

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