Salvo was born Salvatore Mangione in Leonforte, a small town in Sicily. When he was 9 he moved with his family to Turin. As a self-taught artist, in the early 1960s, he began painting and supported himself by selling low-price portraits, landscapes, and copies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh paintings.

In the 1960s, Salvo became a part of the Arte Povera movement, Italy’s contribution to conceptual art. Arte Povera, literally ‘poor art’ refers to the radical movements rejection of traditional art mediums in favour of unconventional, ‘everyday’, materials such as soil, rocks, clothing or rope. Salvo’s work of this time was influenced by other Arte Povera members such as Alighiero Boetti with whom he shared a studio, but also artists like Mario Merz, Joseph Kosuth, and Sol Lewitt. He exhibited his work in the gallery owned by Gian Enzo Sperone, an important promoter at the time for Arte Povera.

His early conceptual work was focused on a narcissistic representation of the self: the artist’s ego in relation to the history of art. He employed conceptual strategies to meditate on the nature of his artistic practice, and the role of himself as an artist. In some works, he wrote his name across the Italian Flag or on images of books, replacing the names of literary protagonists with his own. This practice extended to work on tombstones on which he engraved sentences like 'Salvo lives' and 'I'm the best'. In 1971, he exhibited at the gallery of Paul Maens in Cologne and Yvon Lambert in Paris, both of which were crucial to the furthering of his career. The following year he exhibited in New York at the gallery of John Weber. He also participated in Documenta 5, and showed at the gallery Art & Project in Amsterdam.

After 1973, Salvo pivoted away from these conceptual works and began to explore figurative painting and the grand themes of Renaissance painting. He composed a pictorial language that he was to use from then on, based partially on poverty of form and partially on artificial coloring. He started a series of works with mythological subjects, specifically a series dedicated to Saint George and the Dragon. These paintings were figurative, but the lines looked clumsy, deliberately archaic and stiff. Salvo was not interested in copying nature, but rather in the transformation of the model, thus he flattened the figures, distorted the perspective, and crushed the composition. In these works St. George is too tall for his horse, the lance is too short, the houses too narrow, the viaducts too high or low, the figures out of proportion: everything was out of scale in these paintings, so that they moved between representation and abstraction. The chromatic aspect alluded to an exclusive mental purity: dawns and sunsets were lit a with a sugary palette that fascinated and charmed but moved ever further away from figuration.

Salvo's monochrome aesthetic in his hyper-saturated, imagined landscapes and cityscapes made him an artistic outsider until the international resurgence of painting in the 1980s. The works that he painted between 1980 and 2010 recall avant-garde predecessors like Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà in distilling real, imagined, and remembered spaces into a meditation on the passage of time. He often painted pastoral scenes and quaint villages with a vibrant palette of oil paints and references to architectural motifs and plant species native to the cities where he lived and worked. His paintings focused on abstract concepts like the passage of time, translated through an incisive approach to capturing different lighting situations, further demonstrated by the titles of his paintings (named after different seasons or months).

From 1995 to 2007 he spent several months a year at the foot of Monviso, a place that has inspired many of his works. After 2007, the valleys of his landscapes gave way to plains, and he introduced new cuts in perspective. A trip to Iceland in the summer of 2006 became a starting point for a series of paintings featuring snow. In 2007, Salvo had a major retrospective at the GAM in Turin. He died in Turin in 2015, at the age of 68. The year following his death, the Archivio Salvo was founded in Turin. His works can also be found in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Netherlands, the National Gallery of Australia, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy, and a number of other international galleries and museums.

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