SALVATORE EMBLEMA
White Cube is pleased to present Salvatore Emblema’s exhibition with the gallery.
May 28 – July 5, 2025
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.’
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.
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.