Writing of Salvo for Artforum, Marco Meneguzzo describes the late artist as someone who “never wanted to belong to any movement but who could have been a leader of the Transavanguardia—gifted us with infinite landscapes, foreshortened city views, places without people, almost all small scale, more or less as big as the square backdrops used by strolling balladeers who, for a few decades more, could still be seen in Sicily where he was born in 1947.” Salvo’s enduring muse of the Italian landscape is exemplified in Prima Primavera, 1996, and can be seen across his oeuvre with paintings that compositionally rhyme, reflecting a townscape as it gradually changes over times of day, seasons and years.
Originally from Leonforte in Sicily, Salvo's artistic journey was profoundly shaped by his exposure to Arte Povera and interactions with influential figures such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry, and Joseph Kosuth during his developmental years in Turin. The pivotal year of 1973 marked Salvo's return to painting, which saw the artist skillfully blend the avant-garde conceptualism of his early practice with a vibrant, representational painterly aesthetic. Salvo stands as a singular figure of his time: his bright, heavily stylized paintings belie their conceptual consideration, all the while referencing painters like the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and Futurist Carlo Carrà. His condensed representation of space, vertical compositional build and bright palette even recall the work of Italian Renaissance master Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
Salvo's paintings from 1980 to 2011 are characterized by hyper-saturated landscapes with globulous compositional elements. His style defied the prevailing aesthetics of the 1980s, positioning him as an outlier even amongst the decade’s painting resurgence. Salvo’s works blend real and imagined spaces in a meditation on the psychology of place and abstract concepts like time. Prima Primavera, like many of his other works named after seasons, months and times of day, exemplifies his masterful use of light and vivid colors to translate the passage of time and memory.