Remo Salvadori’s recent show presented variations on an approach he has been refining since 1971, the year of his first exhibition. While Salvadori, a fifty-year-old Tuscan artist who resides in Milan, creates work that seems at first to be an exploration of nothingness, each piece is in fact an attempt to reach something essential.

The show suggested subtle relationships between objects and the viewer’s gaze, between subjects and objects. Lente liquida (Liquid lens; all works 1996), the most arresting piece in the exhibition, consisted of a column, formed from a sheet of copper folded and tied