Torino Artscape is Artissima’s column highlighting current exhibitions in the city’s leading contemporary art institutions: a regular feature offering a glimpse into the most compelling exhibition programs, curatorial visions, and artistic expressions that animate Turin’s contemporary art scene. Torino Artscape invites you to explore Turin as an essential destination for art lovers, offering inspiration and cultural enrichment throughout the year.
This new episode is dedicated to Archivio Salvo.
Interni con funzioni straordinarie
Up to 30.09.2026
A painted column occupies the center of the first room as an unexpected point of color and attention. Essential geometries and broad fields of vivid color transform the architectural element into a playful presence, around which furniture, paintings, books, and objects seem to arrange themselves according to a domestic order that is only apparently spontaneous. Each element in fact enters into relation with the next through chromatic affinities, formal echoes, and small visual interferences, constructing an environment inhabited by images and ideas that coexist within the same mental landscape.
Interni con funzioni straordinarie, curated by Lisa Andreani, is on view at Archivio Salvo in Turin and brings into dialogue different works and presences: from Nathalie Du Pasquier to Ottavia Plazza, passing through Ettore Sottsass, Aldo Rossi, and Luigi Serafini. The exhibition takes its starting point from a title belonging to a cycle of works by Salvo initiated in the late 1980s and inspired by the Gothic cathedrals painted by Pieter Saenredam. From here, the exhibition investigates spaces and the relations that traverse them: those more intimate and domestic within the archive, but also possible environments in which Salvo’s work enters into conversation with artists, designers, and architects from different generations and languages.
The column created by Du Pasquier becomes the starting point of this network of correspondences. Shortly after, in the second room, a bookshelf by the Memphis Group, coming directly from Salvo’s home, houses the volumes by Ludwig Wittgenstein collected by the artist. It is precisely radical design that constitutes one of the first bridges activated by the exhibition: various pieces of furniture and objects indeed dialogue with the geometries and colors of Salvo’s painting, transforming functional elements into almost sculptural presences. In the following room, the large painting Tapis grande (2023) by Ottavia Plazza constructs instead an unstable and theatrical space: tables, vases, books, and ornamental details overlap in a deliberately altered perspective, where the painted surface seems to advance toward the viewer.
To close the exhibition, Nathalie Du Pasquier returns with a 2019 poster on which the word “cretino” appears, in an ironic reference to one of the works that open the exhibition, itself inspired by a gravestone made by Salvo bearing the word “idiota”. A light and playful dialogue runs throughout the entire display, where words, objects, and images continuously echo one another.
– Testo di Guia Agazzi