…Painter, sculptor, engraver but also writer, essayist and stage designer, Fiume is able to use an infinity of means of expression with the spontaneity of an outstanding talent. Some time ago, when the word still made sense, I would have said that he was a pure humanist. Today I would rather praise the man in himself, as a rare species about to become extinct. A Mediterranean man in the noblest sense of the word: a man who has been able to bring his own nature-culture relationship to the level of the most immediate existential equivalence. A man for whom culture passes necessarily through a highly acute sense of complete nature, the nature of I and of the Other, of being and things. It is clear that such a vision cannot but be universal. …The reader may perhaps be surprised to think that Salvatore Fiume and Pierre Restany spent an afternoon in 1992 talking about female parts. Women’s and not angels’, in front of the master’s marvellous canvases! The experience will remain carved in my memory. I conserve an exhilarating image of Fiume, of a highly civilised lesson of truth in emotion and beauty in gesture. Is not loving a woman the most beautiful thing in the world? But you have to be able to translate the unique quality of this love into the logical consistency of language. And it is not just a matter of talent but also morals. If we take morality in its primary sense, i.e. the philosophy of human action and not in its reductive dialectic of good and evil, Salvatore Fiume appears as a true and great poet of love, in the heart of the highest pictorial tradition of Eros. I have no hesitation in saying so, and I am happy to bear witness to this. Artists who are able to combine technical mastery with the emotional wealth of a planetary culture are very rare. They belong to the common good of humanity, and they are part of an eternal heritage.