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Lot Essay
Paolo Scheggi’s Intersuperfcie curva bianca (White Curve Intersection) is a distinctive and characterful example of the artist’s finest work, produced shortly before his untimely death in 1971. Four circular openings teasingly reveal a monochrome underlay of geometrically kinetic, superimposed canvases. The eclipse of the angular shapes beneath the quartet of perfectly circular perforations produces a rhythm at once satisfying and frustrating in its irresolution. Scheggi’s explorations in space and matter, light and shade, negate art historical aspirations for illusionistic pictorial space, replacing them with tangible concaves of planes and a concrete sense
of depth. This effect is almost sculptural, and echoes the Achromes of Piero Manzoni, works that revel in a three-dimensional tactility. Like contemporary innovators such as Lucio Fonatana, Yves Klein, Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi, Scheggi was concerned with rupturing the very nature of the surface, but his singular vision triggered him to experiment with manipulations of perception and perspective in a three-dimensional field.
Intersuperfcie curva bianca was produced at the apex of Scheggi’s career, and is a relatively rare example of his mastered practice: the scarcity of the works is due to their labour-intensive production and Scheggi’s premature death. A year prior to its creation, he exhibited a number of similar works at his first international show. Having moved from Tuscany to Milan in 1960, Scheggi quickly became a member of the city’s artistic elite, and was grouped together with the exponents of ’Pittura Oggetto’ - ’objective painting’ or ’the painting as object’, a term coined by Italian art critic Gillo Dorfes. With its ambiguous material nature, neither painting
nor sculpture, Scheggi’s work complied with Dorfes’s enthusiasm for a ’unique and precious character that can be conferred by manual touch alone… [a] precise striving for compositional finesse and purity’ (G. Dorfes, ’“Object Painting” in Milan’, 1966, reproduced in Elementi Spaziali, exh. cat., Galleria Tega, Milan, 2011, p. 62). By puncturing canvas, the most conventional backbone of fat artistic media, Scheggi creates an uncontrollable conversation between light and shade, volume and void, external and internal, at once immediately curious and endlessly fascinating.
of depth. This effect is almost sculptural, and echoes the Achromes of Piero Manzoni, works that revel in a three-dimensional tactility. Like contemporary innovators such as Lucio Fonatana, Yves Klein, Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi, Scheggi was concerned with rupturing the very nature of the surface, but his singular vision triggered him to experiment with manipulations of perception and perspective in a three-dimensional field.
Intersuperfcie curva bianca was produced at the apex of Scheggi’s career, and is a relatively rare example of his mastered practice: the scarcity of the works is due to their labour-intensive production and Scheggi’s premature death. A year prior to its creation, he exhibited a number of similar works at his first international show. Having moved from Tuscany to Milan in 1960, Scheggi quickly became a member of the city’s artistic elite, and was grouped together with the exponents of ’Pittura Oggetto’ - ’objective painting’ or ’the painting as object’, a term coined by Italian art critic Gillo Dorfes. With its ambiguous material nature, neither painting
nor sculpture, Scheggi’s work complied with Dorfes’s enthusiasm for a ’unique and precious character that can be conferred by manual touch alone… [a] precise striving for compositional finesse and purity’ (G. Dorfes, ’“Object Painting” in Milan’, 1966, reproduced in Elementi Spaziali, exh. cat., Galleria Tega, Milan, 2011, p. 62). By puncturing canvas, the most conventional backbone of fat artistic media, Scheggi creates an uncontrollable conversation between light and shade, volume and void, external and internal, at once immediately curious and endlessly fascinating.