“Money doesn’t grow on trees” – Jonathan Monk

Tra Gli Alberi is a compendium of Monk’s Salvo Trees series. Salvatore Mangione, known as Salvo (1947 - 2015), was an Italian artist who lived and worked in Turin. In the early 1960s he began painting and supported himself by selling low-priced portraits, landscapes and copies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

Monk’s replication (in a similar fashion) of Salvo’s tree and landscape paintings is observed on a variety of surfaces. The series began with inkjet printed Salvo paintings on A4 paper (the start of the series), and intervening with gouache and watercolor, where Monk paints out the simplified Italian landscape leaving Salvo’s trees floating within an abstract field. Continued expansion of the concept lead to Salvo paintings printed on canvases, and remarked with acrylic (the first presentation of these was in Salvo’s old studio in Torino). Continuing with the inkjet prints, Salvo trees were reproduced on fashion editorials and advertisements, furniture catalogues, Monk further enforces the practice of collage and the juxtaposition of existing images (the tone or subjects of an editorial can dictate the tone of the reproduced Salvo painting).

Artists, according to Monk, tend to get an idea and mode of production and stick with it. Tra Gli Alberi is a testament to the artists practice of rule following and rule breaking. The works are priced with logic (something not unfamiliar to followers of Monk’s Restaurant Drawings, where artworks are reproduced on meal receipts and sold for the price listed on said receipt); €100 per tree (printed works), €500 per tree (canvases).