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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from the Archivio Gastone Novelli, numbered 6863T135135.
Having reached his full maturity as an artist around 1958, Novelli began in the early 1960s to investigate all the possibilities of his own artistic language. Seemingly simultaneously all Novelli's signature forms and motifs began to emerge in paintings like Il mito della condanna (The Myth of Condemnation) where the spyral, the network, the web and the checker appear next to freer forms and generate a structure in which every part has its role to play. This dramatic play of form is unified by the sober but intense palette of whites and grays that distinguish many of the artist's finest works.
Novelli often described his paintings as universes or as having what he called an 'urbanistic' structure. As in the case of both the city and the universe Novelli's complex painterly structures are not rigid, but open and subject to different forces and needs that create (as it is the case in the present painting) a continuous flow of movement. A macrocosm and a microcosm, each element is interdependent, no single part can be removed without affecting the whole. In Il mito della condanna, as in many of Novelli's paintings, the compositional structure is fundamental but not dominant. Underpinning the whole work, it nevertheless allows each element its own autonomy and strength. The importance that Novelli gives to the structure of his work needs to be stressed since Structuralism and its systematic analysis of language was a discipline that predominated during the '60s and was a significant influence on Novelli's cultured approach to painting and his working aesthetic.
Novelli found sources of inspiration and reflection both in the past and in the most advanced experiences of the present. The years 1962 and 1963 form a key period in Novelli's creativity largely because of his visits to Greece during these years. Novelli's long stays in Greece focused his work around an intense research into the roots of European culture. The confrontation between Greek alphabetical symbols, inscriptions, and a vast variety of forms, motifs and patterns found on vases, murals, mosaics and other artworks were all assembled and registered in his copious notes and used to nurture and expand the visual complexity of both his imagination and his work. At the same time, Novelli's wide reading and close friendship with many contemporary writers such as Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, the poets of the experimental and influential Gruppo '63 and with artists such as Cy Twombly, Man Ray and Achille Perilli, freed him from any provincialism or historicism and propelled him to the forefront of contemporary culture.
The mythical and magic function of the painting - often mentioned by Novelli himself and underlined in the title of this work - together with the intellectual richness and, above all, the remarkable quality of the visual result are the elements that still attract the attention of the viewer and that explain the fresh, powerful, appeal of Il mito della condanna.
Having reached his full maturity as an artist around 1958, Novelli began in the early 1960s to investigate all the possibilities of his own artistic language. Seemingly simultaneously all Novelli's signature forms and motifs began to emerge in paintings like Il mito della condanna (The Myth of Condemnation) where the spyral, the network, the web and the checker appear next to freer forms and generate a structure in which every part has its role to play. This dramatic play of form is unified by the sober but intense palette of whites and grays that distinguish many of the artist's finest works.
Novelli often described his paintings as universes or as having what he called an 'urbanistic' structure. As in the case of both the city and the universe Novelli's complex painterly structures are not rigid, but open and subject to different forces and needs that create (as it is the case in the present painting) a continuous flow of movement. A macrocosm and a microcosm, each element is interdependent, no single part can be removed without affecting the whole. In Il mito della condanna, as in many of Novelli's paintings, the compositional structure is fundamental but not dominant. Underpinning the whole work, it nevertheless allows each element its own autonomy and strength. The importance that Novelli gives to the structure of his work needs to be stressed since Structuralism and its systematic analysis of language was a discipline that predominated during the '60s and was a significant influence on Novelli's cultured approach to painting and his working aesthetic.
Novelli found sources of inspiration and reflection both in the past and in the most advanced experiences of the present. The years 1962 and 1963 form a key period in Novelli's creativity largely because of his visits to Greece during these years. Novelli's long stays in Greece focused his work around an intense research into the roots of European culture. The confrontation between Greek alphabetical symbols, inscriptions, and a vast variety of forms, motifs and patterns found on vases, murals, mosaics and other artworks were all assembled and registered in his copious notes and used to nurture and expand the visual complexity of both his imagination and his work. At the same time, Novelli's wide reading and close friendship with many contemporary writers such as Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, the poets of the experimental and influential Gruppo '63 and with artists such as Cy Twombly, Man Ray and Achille Perilli, freed him from any provincialism or historicism and propelled him to the forefront of contemporary culture.
The mythical and magic function of the painting - often mentioned by Novelli himself and underlined in the title of this work - together with the intellectual richness and, above all, the remarkable quality of the visual result are the elements that still attract the attention of the viewer and that explain the fresh, powerful, appeal of Il mito della condanna.