Salvatore Emblema ‘Selected Works 1973 – 1979’

Galleria Fonti is pleased to present Selected Works 1973 – 1979, first solo exhibition in the gallery by Salvatore Emblema.

The exhibition comes from a cooperation with Museo Emblema and the artist’s heirs.
The presence of “Structura, 1974”, an installation composed by 5 freestanding elements of modular arrangement, makes this retrospective a successful preview of the itinerant project Being There: a series of museal exhibitions dedicated to the environmental research by Salvatore Emblema which will stop in Museo di Palazzo Belmonte Riso in Palermo next July and will finish in the new exhibition space of Museo Emblema in Terzigno in September.

Selected works 1973-1979 analyzes one of the fundamental moments for the artist’s research and career. Just in those years Salvatore Emblema, thanks also to the fruitful dialogue with Giulio Carlo Argan and with the historical director of Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna di Roma, Palma Bucarelli, was making clear the mechanisms which will characterize his whole future production. The developing of his work on the idea of Transparency. Since the first formal outcomes, based on the intrinsic geometry of the canvas weave and on the technical possibilities offered by the process of de-weaving.

The series of “Diagonali” dated between 1975 and 1978 signs a first digression from the rigid orthogonal pattern. A provocation launched by architect Paolo Portoghesi, almost an intellectual game which announced the impossibility for the de-weaving to free itself from the subtle trap of the endless right angles. Emblema answered using a diagonal band sewed on the back of the canvas or simply changing the density of the color, introducing therefore a visual anomaly that seemed to have memory (completely idealized) of the Baroque perspectives and of the oblique staircases by Ferdinando San Felice.

The idea of a painting considered as a survey about architecture and landscape, both elevated to visual perception, becomes more evident in the works showed in the second room of the gallery. The exhibition, indeed, uses the peculiar architecture of the gallery, characterized by the double central arch, to amplify and organize the hiatus between the clean, almost algebraic, scan of the spaces inside the de-weaves from 1973 to 1976 and the orchestration more pictorially marked of the successive works. Works which are the continuation on the wall of the big installations in the natural landscape that Emblema was realizing in the same years. Works in which Trasparency ceases to be a perspective gap obtained exasperating the surface of the jute, but becomes – completely – a visual category. A filter through which to frame pieces of real space and to expand it in the dimension of depth. On these bases, we find even suggestions of landscapes which, on the painting, are just rhythms of opacity and proportional relations, but which re-assemble themselves in the viewer’s consciousness as specific horizons and geography.

Galleria Fonti (press release)