The domino effect, by which artists fall sway to the hypostasized power of a medium, scored a Pyrrhic victory in Remo Salvadori’s new work. In switching to painting, the former sculptor Salvadori seems to belong within a direction that adopts a north–south European axis: while German painters repeatedly turn to sculpture, searching for vehicles for monumental expression, Italian sculptors increasingly move toward painting, seeking means for gestural punch. The problem in this case is that there isn’t much reason for Salvadori to be making these works, which merely rehearse stale pictorial formulas.
The exhibition consisted of one object—a wall-hung, upturned paintbrush, its bristles gilt tipped as if to emblemize the pressure to paint—and three paintings in different formats and techniques. Their motive seems to stem from the sense—evident in the artist’s previous use of actual or depicted tripods and telescopes—of the “refractory” capacities of form, of its ability to alter, energize, or illusorily construct space. Unstretched canvas is usedvariously as the ground for gesture, the support for imposed form, and the medium of material manipulation. For example, in one painting a small circular lead form is imposed on the canvas, suggesting a material layer or “level” of space, and contraposed to five black, oarlike (two-dimensional) painted shapes. Defining line in the latter is pried loose from form so as to negate itself, hence rotating form into space and, in the process, implying an illusory dimension of depth. In another painting a number of canvas layers, cut to different forms and painted an array of muted hues, are superimposed according to conflicting rhythms and directions. Here Salvadori seems to be trading on the ambiguity of the image—its elusiveness from precise definition—and on its equivocation of placement, for it appears at once built from the floor (through a rising, pennantlike form) and hung from a diagonally posed rectangle. He plays more forcefully on its spatial ambiguities, however, for the lines dividing forms read at once as shadows, as levels in shallow depth, and as the contours of possible projected solids. The third painting is a vast stretch of white canvas centered by a small circular form structured like a record disc, with peripheral lines leading in to a central core, that telescopes space back toward the distant darker space.
I suppose I should find “poetry” or “mystery” in Salvadori’s formal ambiguities, in his use of such equivocal objects as the filigreed lead form or the retreating mandala shape. But the problem with his dialogues of two versus three dimensions is that he has little to add to an already saturated discourse; he can play Puck with painting, frolicking in the medium’s capacities, but he ends up with nothing to say. Salvadori’s strategies worked in the terrain of real space, where the objects functioned hypnotically, transgressing the expected order. In the inherently illusory space of painting, they operate as didactic cues.
—Kate Linker
