Quint Gallery is pleased to present ELECTROSPECTRUM, a survey of Roman de Salvo’s sculptures and early experiments united by the use of the lightbulb. Spanning works made between 1991 and 2026, the works in ELECTROSPECTRUM exemplify de Salvo’s longstanding engagement with material dualities: the ornate and the utilitarian, the handcrafted and the mechanical, and elements of nature, which are both unruly and standardized. Across the past three decades, his sculptures have transformed everyday systems into sites of curiosity, play, and formal invention.
Using and manipulating manufactured, modular building materials like electrical conduits, light switches and bulbs, de Salvo is well known for his conduit works, which reinvent common hardware store materials into maze-like wall sculptures that hint at the complex interior systems powering the spaces in which they are shown.
Early works in the exhibition reveal de Salvo as an inventor of novel but precarious approaches to producing light. In these foundational years, he sought to distill forms and concepts to their essentials, allowing form and function to go hand in hand until, at times, they no longer would. From creating analog lamps with oil- or wax-fueled flames housed within broken lightbulbs, to inserting a house key and copper wire into the sockets of a junction box to electrify a bulb, these idiosyncratic experiments give way to later objects that prioritize sculptural form while retaining an oblique relationship to utility. In works like Wall Prosthesis, a common light switch plate extends from the wall, to present the switches as an optimally angled control panel. Yet, the utilitarian gesture is cartoonishly stretched to absurdity, even as the switches operate the gallery lights.