Vincent Salvati's Artless Perfection
By D.F. Colman

The component that drives great art, what Wassily Kandinsky referred to as the principle of "inner necessity" prevails in all of Vincent Salvati's work. It should be studied by every student of form and structure to realize that scale can be felt even in a condensed framework: it all depends on the eye, the control, the coordination of the eye and the mind at work. Touched by inspiration drawn from a number of sources such as Twombly, Matisse, as well as "the innocent eye" of children's drawings (Klee's words) and art brut, Vincent Salvati's gestural work seems less than a translation of organic growth as much as it is an investigation on geneology and growth.

In terms of its deep structure Salvati's work is deeply materialistic on a certain level. Looking at his work entails feeling the near-glandular materials he has carefully laid on top of his canvases to create a tactile quality that glistens like water and skin in the light. Yet simultaneously this materiality is confronted with a sense of profound dematerialization. The longer one looks at the artist's work, the more the viewer's sense of order becomes jumbled as the familiar becomes unfamiliar.

Salvati, fundamentally, poses questions about the enigma of the work of art and points to worlds that go beyond the norm, an encounter with a metaphysical dimension that is beyond the immediately recognizable. What is at stake here, through the artist's use of his organic or microbiologic metaphors and through his aesthetics of empathy and the sublime is the conflation of the contemplative and the prima materia, the groundedness of factual materiality.

The artist's work exemplifies, to borrow Henri Focillon's words, the creative capacity of the artist to demarcate "poetic transpositions in the tumults of human existence" through the visual recollection of organic forms. Invested with a wonderful conjoined sense of compression and release this artist has a controlled intuitive spontaneity at his control. And this control is exemplified through the suppleness and grace of each work, with its energy flows, its drips, stains, and contours of leaf and flower forms and cellular formations (Social Abortion, 1999). With its fibrillating awkwardness and rambling interruptions, erasures, and built up tactile surfaces each of Salvati's efforts seems constructed and pictorially layered as freshly as any work by Matisse. While we can pinpoint an enormous number of reference points, stylistic, historical, biological in the artist's work it is important to point out that each artist (and Salvati is no exception), if she or he has the capacity to make meaningful cultural contributions, constructs a visual fiction that is fully sustaining and fully embracing. And that this fiction, while it encapsulates elements of the real, goes beyond its source-material in order to unveil another reality behind the one we normally confront day to day.

The recent works by the artist have a febrile-like vitality that is genuine and real. While at first resembling to some degree Terry Winter's early pod-leaf forms, Vincent Salvati's intentions are restrained and purposeful and his work has emerged as identifiably and authentically his and his alone. His latest work refers to the natural world experienced through the energy and flow of his looping patterns that are formalized through, scale, color and brush stroke. He allows the eye to slow down and to see the forces of life that make drawing a testament to the forces of vitality. He explores the limits of figural representation as well as the limits of gestural abstraction and contour drawing in works such as Emigration, 1999. The result is an immersion in the dynamics of form, structure, gesture whose primary claim to authenticity is the effortless, seemingly casual sense of inevitability that greets the viewer in each of Vincent Salvati's artlessly imperfect, yet sublime work.

D.F. Colman is an art historian and critic living in Manhattan