Tabula Sensitiva

Artists

Emil Salto

Press release

Galleri Maria Friis is pleased to present Emil Salto’s TABULA SENSITIVA. This show marks Salto’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition title, a play on tabula rasa, refers to the antique term for a wax-coated tablet used for notes, which was “blanked” by heating the wax and then smoothing it. Often translated to clean slate in English, it refers to an implied neutrality or fresh start. But what if the tablet remembers the scraping?

Palimpsests are the term for a manuscript where the original text has been erased in order to write a new text. More often than not, remains of an original text can still be seen and read. In Salto’s paintings earlier painterly gestures persist, as shadows, light or undercurrents. Their surface, built through frottage, washing and reworking echoes a miswritten letter in a manuscript: what was meant to disappear, continues to shape what is seen.

In TABULA SENSITIVA Salto’s works materialize through imprints and remnants from everyday life. Objects that already carry meaning and experience. Through layering and repeated washings, the paintings develop without ever returning to zero, supposing that a true “zero-state” even exists in painting: earlier decisions are still active, driving the work forward, making it pulse with earlier traces. And it carries how our memory and experience functions: we carry it before we understand it, but we also rewrite it before we can even articulate it.