Rare within the brief yet extensive oeuvre of Piero Manzoni, Achrome from 1962 is a true masterpiece from the artist’s revered interrogation of the formal and conceptual limits of painting. Of the works that constitute Manzoni’s groundbreaking Achromes, the present work is one of only 7 pieces illustrated in the artist’s 1975 catalogue raisonné, in which Manzoni organised kaolin-soaked bread rolls into a monochrome grid. The present work is the second largest iteration, and thus stands out as one of the most significant examples within the series. The quotidian stuff of everyday subsistence, Manzoni’s ordered panini appear preserved like petrified fossils, catalogued and taxonomical in their velvet-lined frame enclosure. Even more so than the more numerous examples composed of pleated canvas folds, it is the Achrome with bread rolls that best express Manzoni’s daring artistic project and pioneering legacy: an organic and somatic aberration of the detached and self-contained modernist canon. This work has travelled extensively on the museum circuit since the late 1960s: from the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in 1969; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1970; The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1998; Museo Madre, Naples in 2007; and more recently to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2015, to name only a handful. Acquired in 1971, the present work has remained in the same private collection for over 50 years.

The brilliance of Manzoni’s contribution to postwar art resides in his simultaneous affirmation and denial of the material and corporeal through deterministic modernist templates: namely, the monochrome and the grid. No where is this better demonstrated than in the present work and the small group to which it belongs. As outlined by art historian Jaleh Mansoor: “In Manzoni’s Achrome with bread rolls, one encounters the full schema of modernist painting. First the modernist monochrome, heavy with its historically determined purity and factual self-evidence. Alongside the monochrome stands its incommensurable counterpart, the grid. This grid – as the axiomatically deduced, central organizing principle that claims to transcend particularity – hovers in a purely optical space. Each, grid and monochrome, vie to lend legibility to the surface” (Jaleh Mansoor, ‘Piero Manzoni: “We Want to Organize Disintegration”’, October, Vol. 95, Winter 2001, p. 30). What Mansoor goes on to explain is how Manzoni unpicks these prewar idioms from within: executed in a manner that ostensibly follows a Modernist formal vocabulary, these works disintegrate the empiricism of the pure white surface and frustrate the logic of universal sameness posited by the grid. The introduction of bread rolls and their lumpy uneven forms – encrusted with liquid white porcelain – contaminate both the grid’s self-enclosure and the pure whiteness of monochromaticity.

Unlike Fontana whose works articulated an atemporal immaterial space beyond the surface of the monochrome canvas (as suggested by the abyss like blackness behind his incisions and punctures), Manzoni’s work, to quote Saleh, “is firmly grounded in his understanding of ‘reality’” (Ibid., p. 36). In 1957 Manzoni wrote his ‘Manifesto of Albisola Marina’ in which he articulated this very standpoint: “[the canvas can no longer be] the utopia of an aesthetic order or the folly of idealism without concrete human origin, an impersonal program whose sole and squalid presence resides in the creation of matter. Rather it will be a living flesh, direct and scalding” (Piero Manzoni, 1957, ‘Manifesto of Albisola Marina’, quoted in: Ibid., p. 36). In Manzoni’s bread rolls, modernist strategies – the grid, the monochrome, and the readymade – accumulate and unravel under their own pressure.

Ostensibly appearing as monochrome surface, the Achrome’s final form is informed via the organic drying process of kaolin. This material, a soft china clay employed in making porcelain and first used by Manzoni in 1958, is not an impasto; it does not require brushing, pouring or physical manipulation. Ultimately it is through the self-defining drying process of liquid clay against disparate materials – the combination of components and the effect of their bonded physical properties – that these pieces achieve resolution; outside of the realm of the modernist framework and instead within the phenomenological world we inhabit.

During a tragically brief life cut short at the age of only thirty, Manzoni forged a revolutionary approach to making and viewing art, emphasizing the surface and materials as the true subject of his work. In the creation of the Achrome, Manzoni awakened an area of creativity in which the painting’s subject was its own self-generating form; in 1960 he wrote: “The artist has achieved integral freedom; pure material becomes pure energy; all problems of artistic criticism are surmounted; everything is permitted” (Ibid.). Manzoni’s prescient innovations anticipated both Conceptualism and Arte Povera, while his artistic legacy, enshrined by iconic works such as the present Achrome, enduringly persists as a revolutionary and insurmountable presence within contemporary art today.