I was born in Bagheria, Sicily. When I was ten years old, my father brought my mother, two younger brothers and me to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the local parish church of St. Rita, where my brothers and I attended Catholic school, I met Fr. Joseph Visentin, a visiting priest from a nearby seminary,  who recruited me after 8th grade graduation into Sacred Heart Seminary, in Melrose Park, near Chicago. I spent the next 9 years in the liberal studies and spiritual exercises that were part of the training for the priesthood. I left the seminary after college graduation in May of 1968 and applied to the Peace Corps.  The Peace Corps took several months to accept me, so I took summer teaching courses in preparation for a year of teaching at Blessed Agnes Elementary School, on Chicago’s south side, a position that allowed me to postpone military service in Viet-Nam.  Upon being classified as a conscientious objector by my draft board a year later, I applied to the Graduate School of the University of Chicago, where I took a year of courses in the notorious Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods, an inter-disciplinary program focusing on intellectual history and reading of original sources.  

Having run out of funds for tuition, I took a job as a caseworker with the Illinois Department of Public Aid, but continued to study and received a Master of Arts degree in 1971 as an un-registered student, through the good offices of Prof. Herbert Lamm.  While at U. of Chicago, I began to work on a series of pen and ink drawings on mythological themes and met the American art critic Harold Rosenberg who kindly allowed me to audit his course on the 20th century avant-garde movements in art, the only art-related course I have ever taken.  At this time I consulted two art professors at the School of the Art Institute, both of whom counseled me against registering as an art student, as I already seemed to have my “own style”.  I soon read all of Mr. Rosenberg’s books of art criticism, as well as original works on art by artists and other critics, and began to seriously consider art as a way of means of expressing what was most significant in my experience of life thus far. My reading in art and art history was supplemented by travel and visits to the major art museums both in the United States and Europe.  Of equal importance in my formation as a painter was a ten-year residence and work in New York City. It was there that, between 1988 and 1990, the project for the eleven paintings and texts, which together constitute a unique work titled The Kandyskin Chronicle, was born and took shape. The work is dedicated to Harold Rosenberg and, for the obvious stylistic inspiration of the texts, to James Joyce.

In general, my work does not propose problems and solutions intrinsic to the means of communication available to the art of painting: the use of a language rich in possibilities of expression is guaranteed through continuous contact with the art, literature and science of our times.  These paintings represent an effort to avoid for art the condition suffered by metaphysics, which, according to the English philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley, had become “a ghostly ballet of bloodless categories”; they are instead an attempt to reflect on the human ethical vocation and to create, as its pictorial documents, the memory of its evolution.

Here is what some critics have written of this work:
"When looking at the work of Tom Di Salvo, it is not difficult to guess at the intellectual and existential experiences (the two are always connected even when they seem farthest apart) woven into its tissue. Each particular solution, however requires a more complex reading.  What is immediately perceptible is a creative tension wholly directed towards the semantic realm of the hyper-symbol. The emphasis on symbolism is certainly one of the essential characteristics of the contemporary imagination. In Di Salvo this nevertheless assumes a particular force which looks into the mysterious web of the imagination and tends to draw out and announce its emerging forms. The tangle of references, horizontal and vertical, from one cultural epoch to another, from deep structures to those of surface manifestations, comes in this way to be expressed in all of its dialectical complexity and explosive force. On further contemplation, Di Salvo's work reflects the intellectual palimpsest of contemporary man, its multiplicity, its contradictions, its zones of light and shadow: a depth of sentiments and problems sometimes expressed in positive invention, sometimes only prefigured."

Antonino Buttitta

Dean, Dept. of Philosophy and Literature

University of Palermo


... all of the eleven paintings of the Kandyskin Chronicle play upon the avant-gardes, post-impressionism, cubism, futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, abstract expressionism and Pop Art, and that from the fifth paining on each avant-garde is conjugated with one of the cardinal sins.  Di Salvo begins the cycle with the most “abstract” sin, pride, and concludes with the most “concrete”, gluttony.  Thus, for example, in the sixth painting, Anger is symbolized by the image of Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, a metaphor for the aggression of the Dadaists, Futurists, and Surrealists ... who shot their angry arrows at art itself; likewise in the last paining, where Leonardo’s Last Supper is related to the theme of gluttony.  The semantic web in this painting is perhaps thicker than in the others because of its insistence on graphic and iconographic images of food and drink.  The title’s reference to the Last Supper, but also “Lasting Supper”, recalls the death of art theorized by Ad Reinhardt and others, art which nevertheless continues to live, like the archetypal Uroboros, by feeding on itself.

Guided by a corrosive and sometimes exquisite irony, Kandyskin-Candide continues her odyssey in the world of art, provoking metamorphoses, disintegrations and new syntheses.  Kandyskin is a metaphor for an art that has unveiled its secrets to itself, gullible and disenchanted, satiric and imaginative, always playing at and searching for a pretext to begin anew.

Gabriella D’Agostino,

Department of Cultural Anthropology

University of Palermo

 

"Di Salvo seems to take up Pop-Art's cliché forms, their belonging to a horizon of mythological images in which the great works of art history live side by side with the fetishes of contemporary visual communication, like the famous nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe for the Playboy calendar...These forms, stored in the collective memory of the Western world, emerge with difficulty from a thick network of letters which completely cover the surface of the paintings and whose threatening serial proliferation becomes an obsessive and all consuming writing. By playing ably with the perceptive mechanisms of figure and ground, through the combination and overlaying of tiles of color, in concealing and revealing the images, Di Salvo elaborates a metaphoric structure whose center is painting itself and its capacity for regeneration.