SOMA is pleased to present Upanishad, an exhibition dedicated to Salvatore Emblema (Naples, 1929–2006), bringing together a focused selection of works produced between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Conceived twenty years after the artist’s death, the exhibition forms part of a broader retrospective reexamination of Emblema’s career and is curated by Emanuele Leone, Director of the Museo Emblema (Naples), and Mighela Shama Lorenceau. The exhibition highlights a decisive phase in which Emblema fully articulated the conceptual, technical, and material foundations of his practice.
During this period, Emblema lived and worked on his estate at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, developing his work at a geographical remove from the dominant artistic centers of the time. This position—distant from Paris, New York, or Milan—allowed him to engage deeply with the major aesthetic transformations of postwar art while remaining outside their immediate pressures. It is from this condition of proximity without immersion that Emblema’s singular artistic language emerged.
The title Upanishad—a Sanskrit term meaning “to sit beside”—offers a key to understanding
Emblema’s stance. It describes a position of attentive listening and contemplative humility: neither central nor marginal, but deliberately lateral. Emblema stood beside the movements of his time, close enough to absorb their revolutions, distant enough to recompose them into a calm, coherent, and deeply meditative visual system. As he reflected on the origin of his grids and visual method:

“Can I steal this immense power of a vision that appears motionless yet changes moment by moment?” 

This question captures his lifelong preoccupation with perception, light, and the horizon —how the gaze moves, shifts, and interacts with space. Among the works on display, Research on Landscape (1972) is a centerpiece. This monumental 14-meter-wide red metal grid marks Emblema’s first sculptural experiment and a turning point in his practice. More than a structure, it is a meditative instrument, a framework through which he observed and contemplated the landscape over several years. Its dense, opaque red absorbs light, focusing attention and almost pausing time, while the natural environment—leaves, roofs, walls, and trees—interacts with its surface in fleeting patterns of shadow and reflection. The sculpture functions like a giant visual meditation, inviting the viewer into the same contemplative space that the artist inhabited: a horizon not as a distant line, but as a field of perception, a space to inhabit, measure, and reflect upon. As Emblema put it: “Painting smooths your eyes, but sharpens the horizon.”

At the core of his practice lies an intense material and optical research. From the late 1950s onward, Emblema developed a distinctive chromatic vocabulary by combining pure pigments with volcanic ash, pozzolana stone, and mineral elements drawn from his surrounding landscape. These materials were chosen not for expressive excess, but for their capacity to interact with light. By carefully managing drying times and surface density, Emblema shaped pictorial space through  perception rather than representation.
Around 1968–69, this research  culminated in a radical shift. Color was confined to the margins of the canvas, while raw jute—long used as a support—was revealed as an autonomous compositional element. This led to the development of detessitura (unweaving), a technique involving the selective removal of threads from the canvas to create zones of transparency. Through this process, light, wall, and environment became integral components of the work, activated only through the viewer’s presence.
Produced during the politically and socially charged climate of the 1970s, Emblema’s work resonated with contemporary critical discourse while remaining fundamentally pictorial.
His paintings resist spectacle and immediacy, proposing instead an experience of time, perception, and sustained attention.
Upanishad presents Salvatore Emblema’s work as an art of  measured intensity and formal clarity—one that transforms the experimental energies of the postwar period into a language of calm, coherence, and quiet engagement.
Special thanks to Mathieu Paris ( White Cube ) and Jean-Olivier Depres who made this exhibition possible.