Piero Manzoni

Acquired by the present owner in the early 1970s

Finale Ligure, Galleria Regis, Manzoni, 1967, n.p., illustrated

Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni, Milan 1975, p. 145, no. 87 cg, illustrated
Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Ragionato, Milan 1991, p. 295, illustrated
Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 2004, p. 447, no. 358, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a few hairline drying cracks mainly towards the base of some of the larger canvas folds, which are inherent to the artist's choice of media. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Achrome, executed in 1958-59, is a masterpiece of post-war abstract painting. Its rich and marble-white folds are a product of Manzoni’s utterly unique aesthetic theory and his pioneering methods of artistic manufacture. A raw canvas soaked in powdery kaolin clay and glue which was left to dry and harden independently into its own rippling folds, Achrome’s compositional mastery nevertheless irresistably evokes a lingering aura of artistic control and vision. Indeed, while Manzoni discovered the Achrome format in pursuit of a random and unpredictable means of production, he equally elicited formal variations across the series, sometimes working with a single piece of canvas, and other times with squares that form a grid; sometimes scattering the folds throughout the picture plane, and other times - as in the present work - concentrating them within a specific area. Achrome thus displays a singularly compelling iteration of the fold formation, offering clearly delineated pleats that arc elegantly above and below the canvas’s horizontal axis. Encasing its mid-line, the curves call to mind a landscape, wherein undulating geological features punctuate a horizon line. While Manzoni expressly eschewed any overt representation, the nearly tactile sense of harmony and symmetry evident in Achrome suggests a kind of primal and organic architecture.

A rich dialogue of avant-garde artistic theories thrived amongst Manzoni and his contemporaries, particularly Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and members of the Zero Group. Yet whereas Fontana and Klein both experimented with and relied conceptually upon colour in their art, Manzoni distinguished himself with the Achrome by utilising only the porcelain white of kaolin clay. He also articulated an entirely new attitude to the picture plane in art. Lucio Fontana’s movement Spatialism incited artists to pierce the canvas and access the quasi-mystical dimensions beyond; Yves Klein’s concept of colour as a means to acccess sublime states of meditative transcendence underlay his patented I.K.B. tone. Manzoni, by contrast, revolted against the implication that art lay ‘on’ or ‘through’ the canvas, or within any given chromatic tone. His comments, advanced primarily in his art journal Azimuth, founded in 1959 with fellow artist Enrico Castellani, establish an entirely different view of painting. Manzoni wrote: “we absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space on to which to project our mental scenography. It is the area of freedom in which we search for the discovey of our first images. Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are: to be” (the artist writing in 1957, quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Piero Manzoni: Paintings, reliefs & objects, 1974, pp.16-17).

Manzoni therefore also advanced a distinctly un-American form of painting, which clashed violently with the current and dominant school of Abstract Expressionism. In the early 1950s film recordings of Jackson Pollock painting in his studio were in circulation internationally, and significantly in 1958 the Museum of Modern Art’s 1956-7 retrospective of Pollock’s work travelled from New York to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. This allowed European audiences to view a full range of his paintings firsthand. When Manzoni wrote desparagingly of painterly “gymnastics”, he was undoubtedly referencing Pollock’s involved and frenetic circumambulations of the canvas (the artist quoted in: Jaleh Mansoor, ‘Piero Manzoni: “We Want Disintegration”’, October, no. 95,winter 2001, p.36). Manzoni later parodied the myths attending gestural painting with his 1961 project Merda d’artista, whereby he produced ninety labeled cans each containing thirty grams of his own excrement, to be sold by weight at the value of gold. Merda d’artista enacted a crude critique of the belief that artistic truth issued directly from the body of the artist. Germano Celant writes that, instead, Manzoni sought artistic power in the natural processes of physics: “…the artist arrested and blocked the fertilising power of his own participation, leaving out his gesture and action, in the hope of reducing the work to its own self-fecundating process. In this sense, the Achrome opposes the artist’s corporeality with an independence of its own. It privileges the flow of the hardening, crystallising material, and seeks to activate the energies buried within the object” (Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale,Vol. I, Milan 2004, XXXI).

Celant’s description evokes the almost photographic quality of the Achrome - that is, their status as material artefacts documenting the culmination of a particular and crystalised moment. Whilst generative processes occur continuously in our environment, their very ubiquity and unimpeded flow often renders them imperceptible. Manzoni, like Eadward Muybridge whose detailed photographic studies broke continuous bodily motions down into their constituent parts, sought explicitly to harness these ambient physical energies and expose them within the folds of his Achrome. In this sense, Manzoni is also affined with Plato, whose condemnation of artistic endeavours stemmed from a belief that representations only constituted a further degree of remove from perfect Platonic forms. Manzoni, in this Platonic tradition, disregarded mimesis and set instead about drawing out and visualising the canvas’s innate energies and potentialities.

Manzoni once wrote: “paintings are and always have been magic, religious objects” (the artist in 1957, quoted in: Gerald Silk, ‘Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista’, Art Journal, vol. 52, no.3, 1993, p. 67). The apparent iconoclasm of the Achrome should not be mistaken as a rejection of this religious function. On the contrary: the present work evinces Manzoni’s profound faith in the continued relevance of painterly practice following two world wars, successive avant-gardes, nihilistic philosophical movements, and extreme forms of abstraction. An object of great and rare beauty, Achrome articulates Manzoni’s answer, that the painterly surface itself - and by extension the entire raw fabric of life - contains the greatest creative potential.