Piero Manzoni

Galleria Lovetti, Ferrara
Private Collection, Italy

Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 2004, p. 571, no. 27, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a very small, light media accretion towards the top right corner of the bottom right square of cotton-wool, visible in the catalogue illustration. The cotton wool squares have slipped slightly on their backing board over time. There are a small number of dust fibres adhering to the surface of the cotton wool in places.
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In 1957, the same year Fontana slashed his canvases, Manzoni created his first Achromes. A body of works which are free from the constraints of colour, form, representation and narrative, the Achromes reject imagery, embracing instead a purely monochrome abstract surface, executed in white. His aim was to divest the painted surface of its obligation to exist as a reservoir for artists' existentialist outpourings. In rebellion against the personal and social responsibilities ascribed to the painting process, Manzoni emphasised the autonomy of the surface and its materials as the true subject of the work.  The earliest experiments have surfaces formed from layers of rough gesso, scratched and marked with tools and by the artist's own hands. In 1958, Manzoni discovered the medium of kaolin, substance which allowed him to create the perfect Achromesurface with minimal intervention from his own hand.

Manzoni continued to experiment with different materials throughout the early 1960s, including substances as disparate as bread rolls, rabbit fur and gravel. The present work, executed in 1962, is composed of carefully selected balls of white cotton wool. Inert, colourless and imbued with an inherent materiality, cotton wool provided the perfect material with which to continue his investigations into depth and plasticity with minimal artistic intervention. Opposed to Yves Klein's transformation of materials to his signature blue, and disinterested in the expressive application of fire and sulphur, Manzoni's fascination lay in the distillation of energy within the material itself. With Achrome, the texture, shape and colour of the cotton wool become the work's own self-generating form: he wrote in 1960, 'the artist has achieved integral freedom, pure material becomes pure energy; all problems of artistic criticism are surmounted; everything is permitted' (Piero Manzoni, 'Free Dimension', Azimuth, no. 2, Milan 1960).