A thin golden line represents an ethereal thread, at the limits of transparency. A border, a limen as the Latins called it, between two dimensions, almost between life and death. A brilliant dynamism made of textile material that aims to exalt the life caught in its totality, cyclical naturalness, rebirth. This is the gold I am talking about. And that shines, recurs and crosses the series of works by Salvatore Emblema that have been selected for this auction. A Neapolitan artist who had a special bond with Turin and its culture at the peak of his career. Salvatore was, in his own way, a forerunner of some of those attitudes of research that would later become Arte Povera, Land Art and, in many ways, even Conceptual art. These works witness to the life and career of this artist, who, starting from the Seventies, elected Terzigno, a small village at the foot of Vesuvius, his creative “Buen Retiro”. A thread - once again - that tied him to Vesuvius. A metaphor for the precariousness of living under a volcano with indecipherable, iridescent intentions, but which, nevertheless, Emblema stubbornly elects as his own place of being. Life, even that of an artist, is never without risks. It can be as exciting as a game and must be approached with courage, awareness and lightness. 

It is with this attitude that Emblema has always played with Vesuvius and wisely used the natural elements typical of this place. Ashes and lava powders often intrigue the plot of the canvas and speak of a land, its transformations and the cyclicality of existence. It is a lyricism with a universal character, a visual story that has always wanted to underline the possibility of using nature as a medium to create art and not to use art to invade or upset the balance of nature. A tree or a stone for him has never been a simple model to copy in the expression of his creative thought. Rather, they have been operational tools to be reduced to coal and chromatic matter for one’s own painting. His works, when placed in a natural context, almost seem to find their most intimate identity. An umbilical cord that becomes a thread of jute dyed with colors that seem to be made of an alchemical substance, as if they were the result of natural transformations. Today, despite the passing of time, that color seems intact, alive in its intensity and imperishable sharpness. This is the lesson left by Salvatore Emblema: a thin golden line that draws a voluptuous and strong embrace between nature, art and life. (by Ernesto Esposito)

"Dear Emblema, since I didn’t meet you at your exhibition, I want to tell you how much I appreciated the seriousness and quality of your work. I was struck by the meditative “metaphysical” melancholy of your paintings. You are aware of the crisis of the “picture” in today’s artistic culture: contested as the product of a refined technique and as the bearer of a message, the picture nevertheless survives as a dimension, a place, though deserted, of our consciousness. It was the tool of the imagination: the magical screen on which the image became an object, gave itself as reality, became consciousness. But in our time that glorifies information, the imagination is paralyzed, its blank screen says nothing but its own availability or virtuality. Analyzing the object reality of the painting - nothing other than the canvas, the frame, the field of preparation - you note that it has absorbed and made its own the mutability and light of the image. The painting becomes sensitized because it does not just receive, does the painting; it’s not just a screen, it’s a matrix. It is the hypothesis, or the perspective, of an imaginary space. And this too is a message: melancholy, but not desperate." (Open Letter to Galleria Stein, Turin, by Giulio Carlo Argan, 1972)

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTION
Tuesday 10 November 2020, 5 pm
Sala Bolaffi Torino, Via Cavour 17

VIEWING
from Thursday 5 to Tuesday 10 November 2020 (Sunday included), 10 am-6 pm
Sala Bolaffi Torino, via Cavour 17