Untitled

"In the 1960s, I was designated as an 'artist' because no-one knew how to define a heap of coal. But I'm a painter, and I lay claim to my initiation in painting because painting is the construction of images, it doesn't indicate a manner, even less a technique. Each painter has his own way of seeing and methods of constructing an image, and the common approach which consists of associating traditional art with the word 'painter' and an anarchistic, modern and experimental role with the word 'artist' is ridiculous" (Kounellis in L'Élémentaire, le vital, l'énergie:Arte Povera in Castello exh. cat., Vence 2004, p. 57).

Untitled is an important work from the early part of Kounellis' career that physically and tautologically asserts his aim of extending both the art and act of painting into the domain of the real world of modern life. It is also one of the last of Kounellis' 'paintings' to exist entirely on canvas.

Consisting solely of a sheet of canvas cut into the shape of a rose and affixed to another sheet stretched to form a traditional painterly support, this work introduces the painter's canvas as a real, tangible and open element capable of poetically expressing itself as itself in the wider domain of the real world. It is in this respect an extension of the logic of Piero Manzoni's Achromes and, to some extent, a progression to the point of becoming a flip-side of Kounellis' own 'alphabet paintings' - the series that he had made directly prior to the canvas-on-canvas works like Untitled.

In these paintings Kounellis had extracted random elements from the sign language of contemporary life and affixed them cartographically onto blank canvases as a way of integrating the semiotics of daily life into the two-dimensional realm of painting. In Untitled Kounellis has affixed a two dimensional replica of the somewhat clichéd poetic symbol of the rose as a way of letting the 'real' material nature of the canvas express itself as a poetic entity in the three four dimensions of the real world.

Kounellis' tautological use of the material - using canvas to signify canvas - and of a time-worn symbol of poets throughout the ages is an act that announces a new painterly language existing beyond the canvas support entirely. Indeed, Kounellis' follow-up to this work was another large canvas with three canvas roses affixed and appended at each end with a column of bird cages containing real, live birds.