"Remo Salvadori"
Artforum, USA, October 1991
Remo Salvadori
"Remo Salvadori"
Artforum, USA, October 1991
GRENOBLE
REMO SALVADORI
LE MAGASIN
On the occasion of his first museum retrospective, Remo Salvadori modified
the gallery to facilitate the presentation and interpretation of his works.
He changed the continuous curved walls into angular and rigid ones. The first
large gallery ended with a narrow, funnel-shaped passage that opened onto a
second triangular space. and finally merged into another large hail. The form
of the triangle dominated the space, and the arrangement of the works, which
"spangled" the walls and the floor in greater or lesser density; seemed
to spiral into the installation Qui non si misura il tempo (Here one
doesn't measure time, 1981-85) and the painting L'uomo che ode (The
man who hears, 1978-87). The variety of the forms and their repetition were
striking, as was the unusual placement of familiar works such as the copper
Tazze (Cups, 1991), which he placed within a square room built specifically
for them, and entitled La Stanza delle Tazze (The cups' room, 1991).
The works seemed to inhabit, and, with their symbolic value and emotional charge,
to sensitize a strangely hostile, rigid space made up of fractures and narrow
passages.
Aided by a few signs, one could recognize that the space, at least from above,
resembled a roughly drawn geometrical profile (eye, mouth, nose, ear), which
extended into an arm and a hand. Salvadori's work might be thought of as a kind
of anthropometry, that is, a measurement of the human figure, for he reflects
upon both the human constitution and upon that which transcends it. He is concerned
with the notion of subjectivity, but this does not entail an idealism that centers
the subject and imbues it with expressiveness. Subjectivity only enters Salvadori's
practice as hypothesis and inquiry; it avoids the authority of established identity.
Identity is necessarily a product of the relationship between the self and the
other, and can only be based on thought engendered by the encounter with objects.
And these objects - a cup, a glass, a table, a bottle - thus become figures
on a cognitive path based on transformation and introspection. Without losing
their specificity as objects and thus their functionality, the amphora, the
glass, and the cup gain a universal significance as containers, and, on a cosmic
level as crucible, belly, and ultimately the world itself. The pieces entitled
Triade (Triad, 1985-89) - three groupings of three bottles each, shown
simultaneously here - attest to Salvadori's desire to overcome the dualism of
rationalist thought. The scattering of the lead pieces in Nel momento
(At the time, 1991) communicates an idea of energy by which thought transforms
matter into substance. The repetitions in the pieces signify the multivalent
meanings of the objects and their materials, into which Salvadori delves. In
L'Osservatore, non l'oggetto osservato (The observer, not the object
observed, 1981-85), a cast-bronze photographer's tripod, reproduced in three
versions, provides the viewer with the experience of being an observer who is
observed observing. And that is the experience of knowing.
Giorgio Verzotti
Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.