Jannis Kounellis

Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf
Thomas Amman, Zurich
Galerie Jean Bernier, Athens
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in the late 1970s

Jannis Kounellis believed in a greater unity between life and art and sought to achieve this by extracting the beautiful and the extraordinary from within the everyday and overlooked. Rooting his art in the timeless and elemental, the first works created with this goal in mind this were the 'sign' or ‘Alphabet’ paintings he made in Rome during 1960. Neither abstract nor representational, these groundbreaking works employed the syntax and tautology of language to express the hidden poetry and mysticism at the heart of existence. They saw a radical departure from all prevailing modes of artistic expression, whether Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism or Pop, and became the roots of a new artistic language: the Arte Povera movement.

Untitled is one of the most important and monumental masterpieces from Kounellis’ first group of Alphabet paintings and was made whilst he was preparing for his inaugural one-man show at the Galleria La Tartuga. In it, the distinctly poetic sensibility and sense of alchemical materialism that characterise his unique contribution to the discourse of Post War Italian art are formally demonstrated; so too is his reaction against the focus in art on action, emotion and unique experience. Taking his lead from the American artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he had come to know through his friendship with Pino Pascali, Kounellis transforms the most simple, universally recognisable linguistic components – letters, numbers and arithmetical syntax – into autonomous, monumental elements. Unlike Johns and Rauschenberg however, whose letter and number paintings give formal, painterly expression to the abstract beauty of the building blocks of language, Kounellis’ dry and bewildering use of letters and numbers was a means of highlighting the transcendental nature of human experience as the most valid and relevant subject of art.

Arranged across the panoramic expanse of the canvas as if to some hidden code or logic, the isolated linguistic fragments that hang mysteriously across the canvas give no clues as their meaning or purpose. Created through the impersonal and regularised order of a stencil, the letters and numbers are divorced from their conventional symbolic functions and give no sense of any togetherness or shared meaning associated with language. Their forms reveal nothing of the feeling or touch of the artist’s hand. Rather they present exactly what they are – fragments of an undisclosed language; one whose translation lies beyond the viewer’s grasp despite the familiarity of its syntax. The Alphabet paintings do not seek to present language or even words as a valid subject for contemplation. Rather the fragments they contain were intended as symbols for the innate alchemy and unknowability of existence; a way of binding art and life together in much the same way that a live parrot perched against a canvas would do later, or, most famously, when Kounellis filled the Galleria L’Attico in Rome with twelve live horses. In their absolute non-sense and dis-order, they highlight the mysterious and perplexing everyday poetry of life.

The Alphabet paintings deconstruct the rational of literal as well as pictorial convention by exposing the inherent abstract artifice of both. As if to emphasise this, Kounellis combined their creation with a memorable studio performance in 1960 in which he dressed himself in an elaborate costume inspired by the one worn by Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1926. At the Cabaret Voltaire, Ball had famously attempted to break-up language to reveal what he famously termed ‘the alchemy of its pure sound’. Wrapped in a painted sheet adorned with numbers, letters and signs, Kounellis’ performance in which he ‘sang his pictures’ as he painted them was a conscious echo of Ball’s deconstructive approach to language and his attempts to disrupt it of coherent meaning.

Kounellis’ absolute exclusion of images and natural forms in his Alphabet paintings in favour of letters and numbers signals an awareness that the ongoing debate between abstract and figurative art was no longer relevant in a post-industrial landscape where signs and adverts are perceived as real. Devoid of feeling or associative colour, the standardized, expressionless forms of the numbers and letters underlines their origins in street signs, and points to the inspiration which Kounellis found all around him in life. The pictures and the forms they took were themselves direct products of the artist’s actual studio environment as he explained. “They [the first Alphabet paintings] were not pictures as such - all the canvases derived form the measurements of the house in which I lived. They referred to the wall. In fact I used to stretch the canvas or the sheet right up to the limits of the corners of the wall, the painting ended there… it was like taking off a fresco, since the canvases or sheets had the form and breadth of the walls of the room.” (Jannis Kounellis cited in S. Bann, Jannis Kounellis, London, 2003, p. 71)

These paintings represents one of the earliest and most important explorations into the complex relationship between text and image, one that was to exert a strong influence over the work of Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth. They question the basis of conventional relationships between language, material and art and life by presenting them juxtaposed and inseparable in a deliberately ambiguous context. We are unable to focus on any single component in isolation but must rather consider their mutual interdependence and coexistence as a whole. Arranged consciously and conspicuously without meaning, we are nevertheless able to relate to the bold black symbols with recognisable systems of language and cultural identity. Although no specific interpretation can be pinned down, certain associations are made and implied. In this way Kounellis seems to be suggesting that even the simplest vehicles for communication like numbers and letters are infused with their own inherent symbolism.