Galleria Il Punto, Turin
Private Collection, Turin

"The problem lies in freeing oneself from the extraneous details and useless gestures; details and gestures that are polluting the customary art of our day” (Piero Manzoni cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, The Serpentine Gallery, Piero Manzoni, 1998, p. 69)

The gorgeously thick, chalky pleats which mark the progression of the composition in this stunning canvas represent the pinnacle of Piero Manzoni's separateness from the artistic process. Very few artists are capable of imbuing an aesthetically sublime work of art with a highly conceptual premise. Manzoni is one of them, and Achrome, 1959, is one of the largest examples of his life-long ✤;investigation into the meaning of the painted surface. Emerging into the art world in the early 1950s, alongside Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, Manzoni tried to define a new method with which to approach the picto🉐rial surface during a crucial period of artistic innovation and cultural upheaval.

In war-scarred Europe, the pervasive sense of failure bound up with vast, historic catastrophe forced a transformation in the role of the artist and the practice of art. The buildings were not the only things in rubble: intellectualism, at the limits of survival, found itself grappling with the horrific conditions of death, anguish and guilt. For the artist, all previous configurations of thought and perception had dissolved and all that remained proved fragmentary and difficult to reassemble. Painting and sculpture became gestural and magmatic, eradicating all pre-existing assumptions of models and forms, defining themselves by “action” in the case of American Abstract Expressionism or  “formlessness” in the European Informel. It was against this backdrop that Manzoni carved his name as an artist and the present work is paradigmatic of his revolutionar𓆉y approach to art at this time of great ferment and aesthetic reappraisal.

Despite his tragically short life of only thirty years, Manzoni’s conceptual approach to making and viewing art radically extended the boundaries of aesthetic practice. Seeking to divest the canvas of its personal and social responsibilities he emphasised the surface and materials as the true subject of the work, a legacy that has continued to influence international art trends throughout the second half of the 20th century: “We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental scenography.  It is an arena of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images. Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain or express, but only for which they are: to be.” (Piero Manzoni, For the Discovery of a Zone of Images, Milan 1957, n.p.)

Manzoni’s  solution to pictorial unity was the Achrome, first conceived in 1956, an un-emotive, white, neutral surface, which avoids and denies imagery in favour of a more radical purity. Liberated from all chromatic or figurative implications and freed of all allusive and descriptive, allegorical and symbolic input, Manzoni’s mute, colourless constructions express nothing but their own existence. The concept that a canvas had been created absent of a personal creative vision was of great importance to Manzoni. The first Achromes were built up of rough gesso that Manzoni scratched or marked. In 1958, the artist discovered the use of kaolin, which allowed him to obtain the ideal Achrome surface. Applied to the loose pleats of the canvas, its chalky materiality and its colourlessness enhanced a sense of the canvas actively expressing itself. Although Manzoni continued to experiment with different materials (felt and cotton in 1960, wool and rabbit fur in 1961, and gravel and bread rolls in 1962) in order to investigate the limitations and possibilities of the painted surface, it is the kaolin on pleated canvas that embodies at its best the artist’s attempt to minimize any sense of his own personality or gesture that might contaminate the purity of the image. It is through the drying process that the work achieves its final form, without the intervention of the artist, who leaves the last stages of creation to the medium itself. In Manzoni’s hands, Achrome establish🌺es itself as a self-signifying sign; it eliminates all autobiography and does away with the personal mystique of the artist, becoming a work endowed with it๊s own autonomous existence. 

The present work, from 1959, is an outstanding example from the Achrome series, which anticipated both Minimalism and Arte Povera. The canvas is arranged into a series of tight folds and creases, coated with the chalky, colourless Kaolin solution, eschewing any associative, symbolic or representative meanings in order to maintain the essential simplicity and purity of the work. Manzoni further asserted the importance of the canvas surface when he stated, “I am quite unable to understand those painters who, whilst declaring an active interest in modern problems, still continue even today to confront a painting as if it was a surface to be filled with colour and forms...Why shouldn't this surface be freed. Why not seek to discover the unlimited meaning of total space, of pure and absolute light.'' (Piero Manzoni, ‘Free Dimension’ in Azimuth no. 2, Milan, 1960).