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Lot Essay
'We often hear of people who do not understand contemporary art, but love the art of the past. This arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of art itself, and we can be sure that the people who say these things understand neither the art of the past nor that of our own time. Because to understand a painting or any work of art does not mean to understand its subject, but to assimilate its meaning. Painting is intended to communicate, not to provide luxury décor. Paintings are and have always been magic, religious objects. But the gods change, they change continuously, evolving as civilizations evolve. Every instant is a new step, a new civilization that is born. The artist is the herald of the new human conditions. He discovers new totems and taboos for which his age has the potential, but not yet the awareness. Hence the concept of the painting, of painting itself, and the concept of poetry, cannot have meaning for us. The artistic moment does not lie in these facts, but in the bringing to light, reducing to images, the preconscious universal myths.' (Piero Manzoni: 'Prolegomena for an Artistic Activity' 1957).
At the end of his most famous manifesto entitled 'Free Dimension' written in 1960, Piero Manzoni wrote: 'There is nothing to say, there is only to be; to live and to do.' (Free Dimension, published in Azimuth, No. 2 Milan 1960). The Achromes - Manzoni's bare canvases soaked and set in kaolin - are the ultimate 'painterly' expression of this statement. Physical declarations of nothingness and of the all-pervasive universality of this nothingness, these blank canvases use the platform and convention of painting - its rectangular canvas support - to declare both its meaninglessness and its end.
The Achrome, which takes many different material forms in Manzoni's art ranging from blank rectangles of fur and cotton wool to blocks of straw, rows of bread rolls or sheets of polystyrene, is the key concept of his art. A non-formal, non-tonal, colourless zone of material emptiness the Achrome refers to and expresses nothing but itself. In a refreshingly open and direct way that would have major implications for the art of Minimalism and Arte Povera, it disconcertingly states and asserts only its own physical presence. Predominantly taking the form of chic white rectangles of varying material, the Achromes were intended to be what they in fact became; creative tabula rasas - clean slates that would wipe away all that had gone before and form the building blocks of the new.
First made in 1957, the kaolin canvases were the first of the Achromes. Responding to the current tendency of the time towards the monochrome canvas, and in particular the examples set by Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana, Manzoni sought to develop the direct and self-explanatory openness of the monochrome to its furthest point. 'A painting has a value only inasmuch as it is a totality', he insisted. 'Nothing need be said: it just is; two harmonious colours or two tones of the same colour are already sufficient to create a relationship extraneous to the significance of the surface which is unique, limitless and absolutely dynamic. Infinity is rigorously monochrome, or, better still, it has no colour.' (Free Dimension, published in Azimuth, No. 2 Milan 1960).
The roots of the Achrome lay in the self-determining material nature of Alberto Burri's Sacchi but, they can also be seen as a reaction against the increasingly mannered tendencies of the informel and of Abstract Expressionism. Like Fontana, Manzoni saw the canvas not as a surface ready to receive an image, but rather as an image itself. Unlike Fontana and Burri however, Manzoni, saw no need for the artist to interfere with this reality at all. Such 'gymnastic' interference by the artist on 'a surface of unlimited possibilities' he declared, only 'reduced' it to a 'kind of receptacle into which unnatural colours and artificial meanings are forced.' 'Why', he argued,' shouldn't this receptacle be emptied? Why shouldn't this surface be freed? Why not seek to discover the unlimited meaning of a total space, of pure and absolute light? It is not a question of shaping things, nor of articulating messages (and one can't resort to extraneous interventions, parascientific mechanilicalities, psychoanalytic intimacies, graphic compositions, ethnographic fantasies etc.) ... every discipline carries within itself the elements of its solution.' (Free Dimension op.cit.)
Kaolin provided both the key and the answer to Manzoni's concerns. Covering a loosely pleated canvases with this white, hard-setting material allowed the form of the work to be largely self-defining. In the most elegant of his canvas Achromes, as here, Manzoni arranged the canvas in such a way that the precise form the pleats and folds was defined by the kaolin as it set. Here was not only a self explanatory work, therefore, but also one that, once the artist had set it in motion was self-defining and partially self-made. Like his later linea (lines), consumable eggs with thumbprints or his signed living sculptures, the inherent beauty of these Achromes lies in the way in which they reveal openly and directly only what they are. Manzoni's function as an artist has been merely to set the seal of his individuality upon the work by creating the context within which this innate and, he argued, universal, quality can be seen.
At the end of his most famous manifesto entitled 'Free Dimension' written in 1960, Piero Manzoni wrote: 'There is nothing to say, there is only to be; to live and to do.' (Free Dimension, published in Azimuth, No. 2 Milan 1960). The Achromes - Manzoni's bare canvases soaked and set in kaolin - are the ultimate 'painterly' expression of this statement. Physical declarations of nothingness and of the all-pervasive universality of this nothingness, these blank canvases use the platform and convention of painting - its rectangular canvas support - to declare both its meaninglessness and its end.
The Achrome, which takes many different material forms in Manzoni's art ranging from blank rectangles of fur and cotton wool to blocks of straw, rows of bread rolls or sheets of polystyrene, is the key concept of his art. A non-formal, non-tonal, colourless zone of material emptiness the Achrome refers to and expresses nothing but itself. In a refreshingly open and direct way that would have major implications for the art of Minimalism and Arte Povera, it disconcertingly states and asserts only its own physical presence. Predominantly taking the form of chic white rectangles of varying material, the Achromes were intended to be what they in fact became; creative tabula rasas - clean slates that would wipe away all that had gone before and form the building blocks of the new.
First made in 1957, the kaolin canvases were the first of the Achromes. Responding to the current tendency of the time towards the monochrome canvas, and in particular the examples set by Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana, Manzoni sought to develop the direct and self-explanatory openness of the monochrome to its furthest point. 'A painting has a value only inasmuch as it is a totality', he insisted. 'Nothing need be said: it just is; two harmonious colours or two tones of the same colour are already sufficient to create a relationship extraneous to the significance of the surface which is unique, limitless and absolutely dynamic. Infinity is rigorously monochrome, or, better still, it has no colour.' (Free Dimension, published in Azimuth, No. 2 Milan 1960).
The roots of the Achrome lay in the self-determining material nature of Alberto Burri's Sacchi but, they can also be seen as a reaction against the increasingly mannered tendencies of the informel and of Abstract Expressionism. Like Fontana, Manzoni saw the canvas not as a surface ready to receive an image, but rather as an image itself. Unlike Fontana and Burri however, Manzoni, saw no need for the artist to interfere with this reality at all. Such 'gymnastic' interference by the artist on 'a surface of unlimited possibilities' he declared, only 'reduced' it to a 'kind of receptacle into which unnatural colours and artificial meanings are forced.' 'Why', he argued,' shouldn't this receptacle be emptied? Why shouldn't this surface be freed? Why not seek to discover the unlimited meaning of a total space, of pure and absolute light? It is not a question of shaping things, nor of articulating messages (and one can't resort to extraneous interventions, parascientific mechanilicalities, psychoanalytic intimacies, graphic compositions, ethnographic fantasies etc.) ... every discipline carries within itself the elements of its solution.' (Free Dimension op.cit.)
Kaolin provided both the key and the answer to Manzoni's concerns. Covering a loosely pleated canvases with this white, hard-setting material allowed the form of the work to be largely self-defining. In the most elegant of his canvas Achromes, as here, Manzoni arranged the canvas in such a way that the precise form the pleats and folds was defined by the kaolin as it set. Here was not only a self explanatory work, therefore, but also one that, once the artist had set it in motion was self-defining and partially self-made. Like his later linea (lines), consumable eggs with thumbprints or his signed living sculptures, the inherent beauty of these Achromes lies in the way in which they reveal openly and directly only what they are. Manzoni's function as an artist has been merely to set the seal of his individuality upon the work by creating the context within which this innate and, he argued, universal, quality can be seen.