Across vibrant landscapes and eccentric interiors, their unique conceptual approaches to painting evolved over decades of experimentation with color, light and form. The exhibition About Painting, with new works by Schulze alongside paintings by Salvo brings into focus their parallel trajectories and contributions to the discourse of contemporary painting. Originally conceived by the late Pasquale Leccese, who knew both artists intimately, this exhibition is dedicated to his memory.

Salvo (1947–2015), born Salvatore Mangione, came of age as an artist in Turin in the 1960s, home to the vibrant avant-garde scene that birthed the Arte Povera movement. He was close with Alighiero Boetti and moved in circles alongside Mario Merz, Guiseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio, developing his own conceptual practice often with text at its basis. Despite receiving recognition for this work, in 1973 Salvo made a radical departure and embraced oil painting in a style that looked to traditional art histories from Giotto and Botticelli to Italian Futurism and Surrealism.

Using bright, contrasting colors that reveal their artifice, Salvo managed to infuse his landscapes and cityscapes with resplendent light effects that seem true to life, if also dreamlike and perpetually still, like in L’Etna Da Taormina (1993).

Andreas Schulze (*1955, Hanover) has played a key role in German painting for over four decades. Like Salvo, he was a participant in the heady artistic dialogues around him—in Schulze’s case, Die Neuen Wilden (The New Fauves) of Cologne’s Mülheimer Freiheit group. Yet he developed his own distinctive painterly methods that balance representation and abstraction, adopting styles derived variously from Surrealism, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism and infusing his scenes of everyday bourgeois life with humor and irony, as well as an intermittent sense of foreboding. At every turn, Schulze both celebrates and defamiliarizes his domestic interiors, urban views and lush landscapes, rendering them strange and absurd through his deft manipulations of paint and compositional space.

In Schulze’s Untitled (Black cloud) (2024), for example, flowing diagonal bands cut through the sides of the work, pouring down its surface in a nod to Abstract Expressionist painter Morris Louis’ celebrated “Unfurled” canvases. Here, Schulze plays overtly with our desire to spot figuration in even the most abstract passages, with the “black cloud” of the work’s title hanging heavily over a pale yellow horizon.

Salvo was renowned for his sumptuous light effects; together with his frequent references to seasons and times of day in his titles, his paintings invariably evoke dreamlike narratives and the passage of time.

Both artists revel in simple things and reduce everything down to its most concentrated form, as well according to geometrical systems all their own. In Schulze’s large-scale diptych Untitled (Concrete and clay) (2024), the artist takes this to a literal conclusion: cube-like forms emerge from a shaft on the left of the composition, trailing one after the other as if in flight across a moody, obscure setting.

Works such as Schulze’s Untitled (At home) (2024) illustrate a similar flattening and expansion of space in his work, just as they reveal one of his recurring tropes: the curtain and the stage, and the theatricality that they both imply.

Schulze’s painterly nonchalance and his very own painterly comedy create a balancing act between representationalism and absurdity and ensure that one immediately recognizes the everyday objects he paints and at the same time sees them in a different light.

Together with the frequent references to locales, seasons and times of day in his titles, Salvo’s paintings invariably evoke narratives and the passage of time. And though humans are conspicuously absent in both artists’ work, they are usually implied—through Schulze’s curtains and homey objects, for example, or the domestic architectures and manicured vegetation that populate Salvo’s scenes.

Salvo’s ability to capture an array of light effects comes to the fore in works such as Reykjavik (2009). Contrary to his usual, almost fluorescent, tonalities associated with Sicilian light, he has moved onto the cooler, paler shades of northern lands at dawn or dusk.