Arriving in Time: Walking Beside Salvo

A Personal Journey Through Color, Silence, and the Longing to Paint

A Sicilian painter’s reflection from Turin

Salvo was Sicilian. So am I.
He lived in Turin. I live just outside the city.
He painted... and I paint.
But that’s not where the connection ends.
It’s in how he looked. How he waited. How he chose silence over spectacle.
At the Pinacoteca Agnelli, in the exhibition Arrivare in tempo, I felt I wasn’t just visiting a retrospective, I was walking beside a kindred spirit, someone who had once stood at the edge of doubt and said, “No. I will paint.”

And he did, for forty years, against the grain, with the discipline of a monk and the vision of a poet.

The Opening: Identity and Distance

The exhibition begins in 1973, when Salvo turned away from conceptualism and back toward painting. The San Giorgio and San Michele works are imposing, thoughtful, historically rich. But for me, they remained distant. I admired them more than I felt them. 

Salvo - The Triumph of Saint George

Perhaps because I paint not to quote the past, but to survive the present. Still, I understood his gesture: to enter the sacred lineage of artists not by invitation, but by self-declaration. That takes courage.

Salvo - Saint George and the Dragon

The Marble That Speaks: Lapidi

Then came the Lapidi, marble plaques engraved with phrases that read like riddles from a dream.
"Simile non identico." (Similar, Not Identical)

Salvo - Simile non identico (Similar, Not Identical)

"Più tempo in meno spazio." (More time in less space)

Salvo - Più tempo in meno spazio (More time in less space)

Words carved in noble stone, echoing something both ancient and radically present. I loved how Salvo rejected the cold detachment of conceptualism. His inscriptions had temperature, breath. They didn’t just say something, they remembered something. They gave form to silence.

A Room of My Own: The Studio

The Studio room felt like home. A space filled with books, sketches, and Salvo’s philosophical treatise Della Pittura. I paused before 48 Poeti, where each book bears the name of a great writer, as if literature itself had been placed on a shelf of light.

 

Salvo  - 48 Poeti (48 Poets) - Libri (Books)

And then I found something that nearly moved me to tears: Salvo’s own name, painted at the end of a list of Sicilian intellectuals. That small act, humble and bold, struck me like a bell. I, too, want to be part of something larger than myself. I, too, want to earn my place in a geography of thought.

The Pulse of Places: Bar Sport

Next came the bars, and with them, the heat of neon.
In works like Al bar, Salvo transformed everyday spaces into sacred theaters of modern solitude.

Salvo - Al Bar (At the Bar)

The lighting was surreal, toxic greens, oranges, pinks, and yet it all felt real. These weren’t people at play. They were people paused, their inner lives glowing through bottles, cigarettes, pinball machines.
De Chirico’s geometry. El Greco’s fire. Rosai’s faces. All filtered through the gaze of someone who knew what it meant to sit in a bar and watch life unfold slowly, until it hurt.

Salvo - Al Bar Sport

The Factories at Sunset

And then I walked into a room that took the air out of me.

There they stood a series of factory paintings from 1987,.

At first glance, one might expect them to be cold, impersonal, relics of industrialization.
But in Salvo’s hands, these factories were not places of labor. They were temples of silence.

Between 1986 and 1987, Salvo turned his gaze to these industrial landscapes, inspired by the outskirts of Turin, by the northern plains, by a fading idea of modernity.
And what could have been sterile became sacred.
He didn't paint factories as they are, not with topographic accuracy or political commentary.
He painted them as mental architectures: pure, stripped-down, geometric, almost classical in their calm.
Their real substance wasn't brick or metal, it was light.

And what light.
This was not the blaze of midday, but the trembling moment of sunrise, or more precisely, sunset, when the world becomes fragile, crepuscular, and full of memory.
Warm reds, honeyed oranges, dusty pinks, bruised purples, these colors did not decorate the buildings, they created them.
Salvo didn’t use shadow to model the forms , he used temperature, time, and atmosphere.

The sun in these paintings is not a background event.
It is the hero.

I was captivated by how the light itself, hovering low above the rooftops, seemed to wrap everything in a luminous farewell.
That final breath of day, where everything, even the coldest structure, begins to glow with something human.
There was a loneliness in those paintings, yes, a sense of abandonment.
But there was also fullness: a celebration of what once was, and still refuses to be forgotten.

These weren’t paintings of buildings.

They were paintings of an era folding in on itself, the end of a collective dream, painted not in bitterness, but with reverent melancholy.
By the mid-80s, Italy was already watching the twilight of its postwar industrial promise.
Salvo wasn’t just recording this, he was mourning it, quietly, through color.
His factories are not places of work. They are portraits, of memory, of loss, of dignity.

And beneath it all, I felt Salvo himself:
A man standing before the decline of something greater than him, brush in hand, eyes full of color.
Trying not to fix it, not to glorify it, just to arrive in time.
To say: “I was here. I saw it. I painted it while it still breathed.”

These works, their repetition, their stillness, their fragile glow, speak of solitude, of the passing of time, of structures that outlast us, only to fade when no one is watching.
But in Salvo’s world, even these ruins are given light, not as decoration, but as meaning.
Because in his painting, light is always more than a source, it’s a soul.

Salvo - L'Autogrill (The Motorway Restaurant)

And that’s what moved me most.
I didn’t see smoke.
I didn’t see machinery.
I saw the sun rising, or setting, over everything we once believed in, and I stood there quietly, trying to understand it.
Because like Salvo, I know how fleeting that light is.
I’ve chased it too.

Maybe he caught it.
Maybe not.
But those paintings are proof that he tried, that he showed up.
And that, more than anything else, is what I want to do.

The Quiet of Night: Notturni

The final rooms were devoted to the Notturni, and I found in them a quiet I didn’t know I needed.
Midnight streets. Soft moons. Empty roads lit by fragile halos.
There’s something about night that makes us more honest. And Salvo captured that.

Salvo - Una Sera (One Evening)

In Notturno and especially in Una Sera, painted with a centuries-old technique that sprinkled starlight across a deep blue sky, I felt like I was inside someone’s last memory before sleep.

Salvo - Notturno (Night)

The works didn’t explain. They invited.
They reminded me that not all painting must be loud to be remembered.

And Still, the Sunset

One of Salvo’s most haunting stories comes in a letter, where he confesses that he once rear-ended a car because he was racing to arrive in time to catch the sunset.

Salvo - Paesaggio con automobile (Landscape with car)

That story stayed with me. Because I know that urgency.
To arrive in time for the light.
To arrive in time for the feeling.
To arrive in time for yourself.

And isn’t that what painting is?
The stubborn attempt to be fully present, not later, not next week, but now, in the gold before the blue, in the color before it disappears.

Salvo taught me that.

And as I left the exhibition, I thought: maybe I will never conquer the canvas the way he did.
But if I can learn to wait like he waited, to see like he saw, to arrive like he arrived,
then maybe I’m already on the path.

Salvo - Ottomania (Ottomaniac)

Salvo - Stazione (Train Station)