White Cube opens an exhibition of works by Salvatore Emblema
Installation view.
HONG KONG.—
The work of late Italian artist Salvatore Emblema (1929–2006) emerges from a sustained and rigorous investigation into light, wherein transparency is used as a device to reformulate the boundaries of painting. Born in Terzigno in 1929, a small town on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, Emblema was deeply attuned to the volcanic terrain of southern Italy, where he lived and worked for most of his life. Spanning four decades of Emblema’s career, this exhibition charts the influence of landscape on the material composition and conceptual foundations of his work, as well as his evolving engagement with site, matter and surface.
Working in relative geographic isolation in the Neapolitan countryside, Emblema remained at a distance from the dominant artistic centres of the mid-20th century. While his work bore affinities with movements shaping the artistic milieus of the time in northern Italy, Europe and the United States – among them Arte Povera, Colour Field painting, Earth Art and Minimalism – he nonetheless resisted any affiliation. Instead orienting his practice towards the perceptual and material thresholds of the pictorial field, Emblema turned to the space beyond the work itself – a space, as he described it, ‘behind the canvas’, one ‘made of light.’2
From the outset of his career in the 1950s, Emblema sought to open the image from within, treating the canvas surface as a site of agency, transformation and emergence. He began by working on coarse sackcloth and raw jute canvas – materials he initially adopted out of financial necessity but soon came to value for their innate qualities – onto which he affixed torn leaves in place of costly pigments. As his practice developed, he saturated the weave with natural pigments extracted from his surrounding landscape. The permeability of these supports proved conducive to his artistic enquiries by allowing for a unique interaction of pigment and light, an interface where matter and luminosity converged as image. The pigments Emblema used were composed of organic materials – including lapillus stones, oxidised metals and agricultural residues – which he ground with transparent binding agents and applied to the canvas in a manner that invokes ancient Pompeiian fresco techniques. By 1969, he was employing a method known as detessute, which involved the removal of threads from the fabric – a rare, early example of which, combined with pigmention, can be seen in Untitled (1970). In so doing, he undermined the canvas’s structural integrity in service of transparency, allowing the wall behind to become more visible through the weave and permeate the composition.
This unravelling of the pictorial surface signalled a deepening engagement with the space beyond the canvas, and by the 1970s, architectural interventions had become integral to Emblema’s practice. Conceived both as autonomous works and as preparatory maquettes for later paintings, these interventions, exemplified by Untitled / Ricerca sul paesaggio (1972), often took the form of large-scale metal nets coated in organic pigments – typically red, blue or white – through which natural light was able to pass. Unlike the Minimalist predilection for the austere, formal logic of the grid, Emblema’s installations were preoccupied with the possibility of a porous, light-letting framework, and the idea of open structures. This sensibility carries through in Untitled (1978), which comprises two overlaid jute canvases. The lower layer, de-threaded and brush-dyed, receives the second canvas while the pigment remains wet. Further flurries of pigment are applied to the upper layer, imparting a sense of vibrations moving across its surface that thereby destabilise the structural grid. The exposed jute, visible through both pigment and overlaid canvas, echoes the wire gridding of Emblema’s metal interventions, permitting a transparency that unsettles fixed boundaries between artwork and wall, material and subject.
These inquiries laid the groundwork for a renewed approach to painting in the 1980s. At a time when the art world was questioning the relevance of the medium, Emblema’s focus shifted decisively towards representation, departing from the pure abstraction that had typified his earlier work. In Untitled (1980), his emphasis on transparency gives way to a denser, more gestural language, where a patch of verdigris emerges from beneath a densely painted black ground. Still, Emblema’s exploration of transparency was never fully abandoned, as a work from the following year asserts. In Untitled (1981), two fields of blue pigment descend across the overlaid jute canvases, leaving entirely unpigmented zones where threads have been removed from the weave.
Underlying the material and spatial shifts in Emblema’s work – from his expansive colour fields on unprimed jute canvas to his large-scale interrogations of site – is an endeavour to test the conditions under which painting might exist. Informed by the artistic movements of the avant-garde, the material legacies of ancient painterly techniques, and a recursive engagement with the landscape of his origins, Emblema’s works are registrations of place that never cede to pictorial closure.
1 ‘I Belong To Light’, Museo Emblema archive
2 Conversation between Salvatore Emblema and Amnon Barzel, Terzigno, 17 August 2004, Salvatore Emblema: Transparency, 2013, Iemme Edizioni: Napoli, p.113
