…The corpus of his drawings, an extraordinary revelation of his creative genius, places the figure of Salvatore Fiume at the same level as the greatest European artists of this century… When Salvatore Fiume is inspired by the geometries of Paolo Uccello, the graphical-cubist exercises of Picasso, certain themes from Goya, by the surreal games of de Chirico and Savinio, his work is never imitative. Rather, it seems willingly to leave its boundaries, the traditional themes, like the cities of statues, the coloured models, the islands, to hold a conversation on equal terms with these masters, spiritual fellow travellers; it is as if it were a kind of competition, trial, to show his autonomy, to defend his own identity…

…Thus, in a totally autonomous manner Fiume proposes (while an artistic debate proceeds in increasingly sterile controversies between figurative art and abstraction) another way of being, an approach that Aretino and Vasari would have meant to be, “anciently modern, and modernly ancient”. And this could be, as Ponti cleverly perceived, the authentic Italian way within modernity, the modernity advocated and attempted in various ways entre deux-guerres but only occasionally seen, and above all only occasionally understood: that “different modernity” which, about a decade later, a figure like Aldo Rossi could indicate in Sironi’s constructionism, and whose necessity Fiume appears to deploy with an already mature and non problematic self- assuredness…. Well before the pop culture implemented the same practices from the point of view of cynicism and of image manipulation, Fiume tries neither an epigonal nor a nostalgic way, but rather a loving one, so as to become, as was well noticed by Savinio, one of the rare authentic heirs of the classical recovery that had taken place in previous decades. In support to this choice of his are some personality traits, and vocations, which impose themselves on the artist with the force of necessity. When Raffaele Carrieri summarises his profile as “entangled, scathing, playful, acrobatic, multi-faceted”, when he speaks of his painting as a “powerful and sudden flow” reaching “an expression of extreme vitality”, he is warning that Fiume does not belong to the line, which in those decades was more and more flourishing, of artists burdened with concepts and at the mercy of theories and ideologies, and much less to the line of those who interpreted the healthy notion of discipline as a kind of Savonarola rule of aesthetics…