Paolo Scheggi

Galleria Il Ponte, Florence

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2008

Florence, Galleria Il Ponte; and Galleria Tornabuoni, Paolo Scheggi: A Retrospective 1957-71, 2007-08, p. 73, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are some minor handling marks and associated wear in places to the edges and corner tips. Very close inspection reveals a few faint and unobtrusive rub marks: one along the right edge approximately 30 centimetres from the top right corner and another towards the left edge approximately 40 centimetres from the top edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Existing in the narrow margin between sculpture and painting, Senza titolo (Intersuperficie curva rossa) is an elegant work of captivating composition. In that Paolo Scheggi’s artistry was founded on the idea of the painting-as-object, and characterised by an emphasis of the physicality of the canvas, it is a prime example of his output. Furthermore, as much as any work from this celebrated latter phase of his life, the present piece embodies that criteria for artistic success established by Agostino Bonalumi: “that the art work had to be driven by – and originate in – a precise intentionality, in a constant effort of maximum vigour” (Agostino Bonalumi quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Robilant and Voena, Paolo Scheggi: The Humanistic Measurement of Space, 2014, p. 173).

Even within an oeuvre celebrated for its formal beauty, the present work is exceptional for its visual interest and neat interplay of geometric forms. From a blank rectangle of saturated scarlet, 28 circular holes are cut, and through their apertures we glimpse interwoven squares in tight perpendicular layers. By this stage in his career, at the height of his powers and only two years before his premature death, Scheggi was insistent on geometric exactitude, aware of the dramatic interplay that it would create; curvilinear voids are juxtaposed with hard-edged diagonals while the flatness of red contrasts with the shrinking depths of shadow. It is a mesmeric panel that aptly evinces the plasticity of this artist’s visual language.

The volumetric overlapping of canvases and the studied placement of voids were the central tenets of Scheggi’s distinct oeuvre. In this way, he is best considered alongside his close contemporary Lucio Fontana. Both artists advanced conventional concepts of paintings in order to take the medium into an utterly new dimension. Both, in puncturing the picture plane, eschewed the Italian painterly tradition and smashed the window through which perspectival recession had been comfortably viewed for hundreds of years. And both, echoing contemporaneous exploration into the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, purposefully pushed their work into a new dimension. In cutting through the known limits of art, and bursting into the void beyond the canvas, these two artists echoed and recapitulated the concurrent paradigm-shifting scientific advances in space exploration.

By 1969, Scheggi had been in Milan – that city which energised his life and catalysed his creativity – for nearly a decade, and his artistic circle was firmly established. He had already been heralded by famous critic Gillo Dorfles as a central protagonist of the Pittura Ogetto movement, alongside the aforementioned Bonalumi and Fontana, and other luminaries Enrico Castellani and Dadamaino. All were united in their defiance of artistic expression, and their strict adherence to matters of form and space. Above all, the artists of this movement went beyond the figurative and the abstract in order to stress and explore the object nature of their paintings.

In this regard, Scheggi was exceptional. Where Castellani’s Superficie series have all their meaning ascribed to the surface of the work, and Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale compel the viewer to peer past the canvas into the void beyond, Scheggi’s Intersuperficie operate somewhere in between, demanding to be viewed as objects in their own right, and existing just beyond the confines of two-dimensionality. The present work is a superb example; in its interpretation we are not distracted by matters of representational or emotional significance, nor wooed by artistic gesture, but remain resolutely captivated by the tension and counterpoint between its delicately contrasting geometric forms.