Remo Salvadori

On the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the gallery’s opening, from October 25th, 2024, to January 18th, 2025, BUILDING hosts Remo Salvadori, a solo exhibition dedicated to the artist who inaugurated the same spaces to the public in October, 2017. The exhibition unfolds across the three exhibition floors and on the exterior façades of the gallery: the architecture containing Salvadori’s works takes on the qualities of a living body, on which the artist intervenes with a series of works conceived as acupuncture interventions, beneficial actions that enter into BUILDING.

This exhibition is part of the artist’s long path of research since 1971; the pieces offer their singularity to constitute a cohesive organism that inhabits the gallery floors in a dialogue between form and matter, time and space, action and meditation.

Announcing Salvadori’s presence from the façade facing Via Monte di Pietà, is the site-specific work Nel momento [In the Moment] (2017) – a seminal work in Salvadori’s poetics since 1974 – a composition of five tin elements on what is now a sensitive surface, a note that resonates in the urban context. In addition, the façade facing the inner courtyard of the building hosts an artwork composed by thirteen lead elements, that offer itself as a gaze upward and as a reflective point of the exhibition path. Just as the tin works on the opposite side reflect sunlight illuminating the surrounding space, the pieces in lead retains it: thus, the two installations create a light-related dialectic that embraces the entire architecture.

Entering BUILDING, the sculptures entitled L’osservatore non l’oggetto osservato [The Observer not the Object Observed] (2024) welcome the visitor to the ground floor. Deeply emblematic of the artist’s poetics, the artworks invite the viewer to the active participation and replicate the precise point of view of those who were involved in their creation. The exhibition continues with Non si volta chi a stella è fisso [Fixed to a Star One Turns Not] (2024), a majestic site-specific work in Corten steel, consisting of five stars positioned one upon the other, that ideally replace the central pillar on the ground floor. The work, which re-proposes a cornerstone of the artist’s research, is presented on this occasion in a monumental format and becomes pivotal to the exhibition’s display dynamic. Closing the ground floor, in the niches, is exhibited Alveare [Hive] (2024), a work in copper that unfolds with its light verticality evoking a musical score.

If the ground floor is characterized by the presence of Non si volta chi a stella è fisso [Fixed to a Star One Turns Not], which, with its volume, serves as a spiritual and physical base for the exhibition, the first floor offers the visitor an encounter with the color indigo and the substance silver, an unprecedented solution that the artist himself calls “a work found in the breath of a long time.” The color and metal presented, strongly felt by Salvadori and recurrent in his practice, are elements juxtaposed in a work for the first time by the artist. The latter, entitled Nove giornate [Nine Days] (2024), is composed of sixty-four hexagons painted with watercolor, in dialogue with ten silver elements that are part of the cycle of works Nel momento [In the Moment] (2024). The selection of watercolors continues in the long sleeve of the first floor with Triade (2024), whose multiple examples of works on paper are arranged according to musical intervals.

The second floor, focused on Vedersi Vedere [Seeing Oneself Seeing], is the culmination of the ascending path begun on the ground floor. After the monumentality of the first two exhibition floors, the last one offers itself to the eye as an intimate space, invites to enter into a more intimate relationship with the artworks: some of Tazze [Cups] (2023, 2024), including those selected for the cover of the artist’s forthcoming monograph published by Skira.
For the artist, their figure – a container that assumes within it a content – embodies the most emotional dimension of the relationship with the world: “For me, the cup is the possibility of relationship with others, the possibility of moving from an illusory two-dimensional stage to a real, multi-dimensional state.”
Along with the Tazze [Cups], other works are displayed on the second floor, some created especially for the exhibition: L’osservatore non l’oggetto osservato [The Observer Not the Object Observed] (2024) on the measure of an infant, Vedersi vedere [Seeing Oneself Seeing] (1996/2019), Alveare [Hive] (2024), Non si volta chi a stella è fisso [Fixed to a Star One Turns Not] (2024), and Nel momento [In the Moment] (1998).

The exhibition includes different families of works, the result of a rigorous practice of knowledge, composition, and discipline. The seven pure metals and their correspondences and symbologies constantly accompany Salvadori in his research and art practice: they recall a spiritual and metamorphic dimension. Although the works exhibited may evoke a baroque and mysterious universe, they are resolved in rare manifestations of the essential.