.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
"Now forty-five, Afro has been working for a number of years in an abstract style, which evolved originally from a cubist discipline. But it is only in the recent paintings that he has generalised, avoiding specific landscape or narrative connotations. These paintings in which he moves away from flat and defined formal devices - especially line - reflect his dominating interest in the over-all atmosphere rather than in the units that compose a painting. (Dore Ashton : "Art : paintings by Afro", The New York Times, December 1957.)
Painted in 1957 Testa di Ponte (Bridgehead) is a work from the height of Afro's maturity when the artist was working increasingly in America and on important commissions like the one for the mural for the UNESCO building in Paris. One of the first Italian painters to fully absorb the influence of Abstract Expressionism and to reflect this influence in his work, Afro's art forms an important link between the American and Italian avant-garde of the 1950s. It is in this sense that it is highly appropriate that Testa di Ponte should have formed a part of the Seagram collection for the last forty-five years.
Afro was the first Italian artist to form a significant link with the artists of the New York school and during the 1950s he grew particularly close to Willem de Kooning. Both artists were heavily indebted to the pioneering abstract morphology of de Kooning's friend and mentor Arshile Gorky and it was the basic pictorial logic of Gorky's art that came to underpin much of the development of both painters' increasingly abstract work. By 1957 however, Afro had devised a new method which developed the emotional morphology of Gorky and tachist sense of surface of the Informel movement in Europe into a new hybrid form of abstract form, colour and gesture.
While still rooted in the objective world of figuration, Afro had developed an essentially abstract and 'pure' form of painting in which a new sense of freedom of painterly gesture and expression immediately came to the fore. Colour, form, and brushstroke were merged into tight abstract structures that, though seemingly non-objective, seemed to embody and reflect the physical properties of the 'real' world. After an exhibition of these works in California in 1958, one critic argued that "it is impossible to make literature about these works. They are paintings. They exist on canvas within their frames. They convey richness without luxury, vigour without explosion; and they hold reason and improvisation in admirable balance." (This World, 27 April 1958, cited in: M. Graziani, B. Drudi and A. Gubbiotti, Afro Catalogo generale ragionato, Rome 1997, p.399.)
Painted in 1957 Testa di Ponte (Bridgehead) is a work from the height of Afro's maturity when the artist was working increasingly in America and on important commissions like the one for the mural for the UNESCO building in Paris. One of the first Italian painters to fully absorb the influence of Abstract Expressionism and to reflect this influence in his work, Afro's art forms an important link between the American and Italian avant-garde of the 1950s. It is in this sense that it is highly appropriate that Testa di Ponte should have formed a part of the Seagram collection for the last forty-five years.
Afro was the first Italian artist to form a significant link with the artists of the New York school and during the 1950s he grew particularly close to Willem de Kooning. Both artists were heavily indebted to the pioneering abstract morphology of de Kooning's friend and mentor Arshile Gorky and it was the basic pictorial logic of Gorky's art that came to underpin much of the development of both painters' increasingly abstract work. By 1957 however, Afro had devised a new method which developed the emotional morphology of Gorky and tachist sense of surface of the Informel movement in Europe into a new hybrid form of abstract form, colour and gesture.
While still rooted in the objective world of figuration, Afro had developed an essentially abstract and 'pure' form of painting in which a new sense of freedom of painterly gesture and expression immediately came to the fore. Colour, form, and brushstroke were merged into tight abstract structures that, though seemingly non-objective, seemed to embody and reflect the physical properties of the 'real' world. After an exhibition of these works in California in 1958, one critic argued that "it is impossible to make literature about these works. They are paintings. They exist on canvas within their frames. They convey richness without luxury, vigour without explosion; and they hold reason and improvisation in admirable balance." (This World, 27 April 1958, cited in: M. Graziani, B. Drudi and A. Gubbiotti, Afro Catalogo generale ragionato, Rome 1997, p.399.)