Art

Against 'presentism': the dreamlike universe of Salvo Russo

Its 'hypermannerism' (Italo Tomassoni), recalls the performative and moulding power of the Canon, the 'Goethean' need for style, form as a guarantee of artistic meaning

by Luca Siniscalco

17 December 2025

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

The whole world, understandably, attempts to confront current events. This 'presentist' tension invests politics, international relations, economics, sociology - all disciplines endowed with a complex theoretical, methodological, speculative background, often forgotten in favour of the power of the 'contingent' - transient, yet insistent, seductive, even bombastic.

This tension of chasing the novelty of the moment also overwhelms those who, like the writer, deal with cultural phenomena and, in particular, art. Hence, art is often spoken of to introduce extra-artistic discussions, to 'visualise' socio-political issues, to deconstruct current affairs. Art is 'spoken' and 'acted' by forces that nail it - and nail us - to the present.

On the risks of a vision thinned down to the mere 'passion of the present' (Giacomo Marramao), chasing the 'news' and current affairs - Martin Heidegger would say: 'the chatter' -, the culture of all times has expressed itself. According to Nicolás Gómez Dávila, the 'Nietzsche of Bogotá', 'the philosopher is not the spokesman of his age, but a captive angel in time'. Christopher Lasch, in his seminal 'The Culture of Narcissism', argued: 'Living for the present is the dominant obsession - living for oneself, not for predecessors or posterity. We are rapidly losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations rooted in the past and projected into the future. It is the loss of a sense of historical time'.

François Hartog

Today 'presentism' - i.e., according to François Hartog's theory, a condition of dereliction of time, deprived of both the past and future dimensions, hence impoverished, one-dimensional, tyrannical time - dominates unchallenged. No continuity can any longer be established between past and future: the past loses its necessity and lends itself to any mythologisation, instrumentalisation and re-creation; the future is operationalised in instrumental and solutionist terms by the 'algorithmic' logic of the present - it is nothing but future without future.

Here then, to escape, even if only for a moment, from this cloak, an explosive suggestion comes to us from the surreal work of Salvo Russo, a Catanese exponent of Pittura Colta, an artistic movement that claims within postmodernism a new beginning for a rigorous painting, in terms of both form and content, as well as directed towards surreal and metaphysical trajectories.

His 'Diario di bordo' recently became the title of a fine exhibition at the Carta Bianca Gallery in Catania, curated by Director Francesco Rovella. A refined anthological selection of some of his best works - best also because they are able to 'quench' the thirst for the 'actual' and feed the viewer's creative imagination.

"Salvo Russo (born in 1954)," explains Rovella in the critical text introducing the exhibition, "was, together with Alberto Abate, one of the leading artists of the Galleria il Polittico, owned by Arnaldo Romani Brizzi who, in Rome, was the point of reference of the figurative current (cultured, anachronistic or citationist) that had as tutelary numi the critics Maurizio Calvesi and Italo Mussa. At the Polittico Russo he exhibited fifteen times, three solo exhibitions and twelve group exhibitions. And how can we not emphasise his relationship with the historic art dealer Claudia Gian Ferrari who introduced him to her Milan audience in three exhibitions in the 1980s'. Biographical data that evoke a fundamental junction in the history of 20th-century Italian art: the movement of the 'return to painting' that, after decades of minimalism and conceptualism, reaffirmed the aesthetic and existential need for the demiurgic relationship with traditional artistic techniques, with the figurative, with the mythical-symbolic domain, with the utopian and propositional instance of beauty.

Russo's pictorial quality traverses some of the great experiences of the 20th century avant-gardes with a citationist flair: Surrealism, De Chirico's Metaphysics, Klimt's feminine. This aesthetic journey, however, is inlaid with unique and personal references: his Sicilian identity, his obsessions with certain singular mythologies - e.g. the horse, the balloon, the elephant -, the neo-Renaissance slant of certain plastic constructions, especially in his refined naturalistic lunges. His 'hypermannerism', to use an expression of critic Italo Tomassoni, aims to recall the performative and moulding power of the Canon, the 'Goethian' need for a style, form as a guarantee of artistic meaning. As Angelo Scandurra later noted: "Russo 'looks' outside to see himself inside. And this condition drives him to include men, animals and things that populate a universe where everything has a mythical flavour. (...) The heart of a firmament pulsates with shades of meaning that only Mediterranean winds can caress our bodies'.

Russo dreams, imagines without constraints, and induces us - if only for a moment - to escape with him from the cages of a 'certain' present to discover an inactual, deeper one. In the 'here and now' the Elsewhere opens up - this is what art has taught us from the very beginning, and it is good that, as Russo has intuited, it does not cease to remind us.