garage BENTIVOGLIO

On one of the many walls in Bologna, the phrase “Things are only knowable if placed in relation to other things” stands out. The core of art, in fact, is never the work itself, but the universe of meanings it manages to trigger: of genealogy, of resemblance, of imitation. The relationship with history is at the heart of Salvo’s research; from his conceptual beginnings, his work has looked to the past. While his peers in Arte Povera returned to formal archetypes, showing materials and objects for what they are in the real world, the Turin-born artist reclaimed compositional archetypes. His 1970 *Autoritratto (come Raffaello)* (Self-Portrait (as Raphael)) anticipates the choices he would make in the years to come; the references to the color masters of the Italian Renaissance, the *après* from Carpaccio and El Greco, and the reinvention of genres like the landscape and the *capriccio*—which would also be central to his commercial success in recent years—are immediately clear. For an artist who investigated the relationship between originality and imitation, between homage and copy, it seems only natural to be the subject of subsequent reinterpretations. Jonathan Monk’s interest in Salvo’s work focuses almost exclusively on trees, a fairly simple landscape element that becomes a pretext for other considerations, including economic ones. The growing market demand for Salvo’s canvases makes his epigones immediately desirable as well, and Monk decides to sell his works based on the number of trees they contain. The English artist has always directly connected his work to price; his Instagram account @monkpictures is a collection of his receipts decorated with small copies of artworks, purchasable for the cost of the receipt itself. Monk’s obsession with Salvo is the same one collectors harbor for the Turin-born artist, of whose work Palazzo Bentivoglio houses a small collection. If art history has always been a web of references and connections, a collection cannot be anything less.