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Lot Essay
'Schifano's Monochromi developed the highly tactile painterly surfaces of his previous work and presented it as a primal entity - an energised field of painterliness signifying little other than itself. Beginning with works that were solely blocks of pure monochrome colour, Schifano's Monochromi became what one critic has described as 'screens... of departure' and 'spaces of negated events'.
G. Bonini, quoted in Achille Bonito Oliva (ed.), Mario Schifano, 1998, Milan, p. 206.
Senza titolo is one of Mario Schifano's celebrated Monochromi - the pioneering series of monochrome enamel paintings that established the artist's reputation as the leading Italian painter of his age when he exhibited them for the first time at the Galleria La Salita and the Venice Biennale in 1960. Seemingly comprised of two highly textural monochrome blocks of dark opaque colour overlaying a pale contrasting ground, this work, also executed in Schifano's groundbreaking and watershed year of 1960, is a major triptych-like sequence of monochromes that marks the artist's emergence at the forefront of Italian painting at this time.
Schifano's Monochromi developed in response to the earlier informel-inspired paintings he had made in the late 1950s. These earlier paintings were ones in which, often using a cement base, Schifano had scratched into the predominantly monochrome base of the work to create tactile incisions that articulate the material nature of painting and in some respects recall the explorations of Alberto Burri. In 1958 Schifano had exhibited at the Galleria Appia Antica in Rome alongside Francesco Lo Savio and Piero Manzoni but it was only in 1959 at another group exhibition at the Gallaeria La Salita alongside artists who with him would come to form the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo (Lo Savio, Tano Festa, Franco Angeli and Guiseppe Uncini) that Schifano came to critical prominence. The emergence of the first Monochromi in 1960 signified both a culmination of his recent work and a new beginning.
Marking both a rejection of his earlier informel tendency and an extension of its preoccupation with the plastic and material nature of painting into an open expression of itself, Schifano's Monochromi developed the highly tactile painterly surfaces of his previous work and presented it as a primal entity - an energised field of painterliness signifying little other than itself. Beginning with works that were solely blocks of pure monochrome colour, Schifano's Monochromi became what one critic has described as 'screens... of departure' and 'spaces of negated events'.(Giuseppe Bonini, writing in Achille Bonito Oliva ed. Mario Schifano, 1998, Milan, p. 206). Schifano himself described his Monochromi as 'primal', 'signs of energy' and 'empty images' beyond 'cultural intention'. 'At first I used to paint with a very few colours', he recalled in 1972, 'because my work expressed the idea of the emblematic, of street signs, of perceptual phenomena, of primal things. I thought that painting meant starting from something absolutely primal... I would paint works like this: with blue, with red, with yellow, with greenthese were signs of energy... with nothing in them, empty images () that went beyond any cultural intention. They wanted to be only themselves' (Mario Schifano in an interview with Enzo Siciliano, (trans. F. Luino), 'Lui ama Nancy la fotografa', Il Mondo, 16th November 1972)
Anticipating much of the form and logic of the Minimalist and Conceptual approach to painting that would dominate so much of the latter part of the 1960s, Senza titolo manifests itself almost as if it is an object presenting the act of painting as a kind of logical and methodical progression of becoming and dissolving - a moving or operating in the unique space between form and formlessness. The painting does this by taking a tripartite form comprised of three monochrome blocks of enamel colour, the first two seemingly labelled 'one' and 'two' and the third being solely of a monochrome cream block - an apparently infinite or empty field of the same colour as the small numerals on the first two. In this way a simplistic formal hint at a progression towards infinity or nothingness is subtly conveyed. The work's clear emphasis on the carefree texture of the applied paint, its two-tone colouring and its dry seemingly conceptual deconstruction of the painterly process to the point where it consists of solely of a simple numerical system and of colouring-in, clearly also echoes the painterly approach of an artist like Jasper Johns, whom Schifano greatly admired. In a development from Johns' work however, Senza titolo also seems - through the logic of its loose painterly application within strict numerical and geometric confines - to assert itself as near authorless or perhaps self-authoring creation. Within the strict boundaries and formal structure that the painting has set for itself however, Schifano has revelled in a degree of freedom in the way in which he has slapped and pulled the uniformly coloured enamel paint onto the surface allowing it to drip and splash in a loose and open way that appears to belie or undermine the apparent rationale of its formal logic and structure. Characteristic of the Monochromi as a whole, it is in this way too that the two black monochromatic panels appear as, as much a negating of the canvas surface of the work as they are an assertion of painterly form.
It was the Monochromi that first brought Schifano to the attention of Illeana Sonnabend with whom Schifano exhibited at her Paris gallery in 1962 and 1963. Such was Sonnabend's enthusiasm for these works that she was outraged with the artist in 1963 when he announced to her that he was moving on from these works and didn't want to make any more subsequently breaking off all relations with him.
G. Bonini, quoted in Achille Bonito Oliva (ed.), Mario Schifano, 1998, Milan, p. 206.
Senza titolo is one of Mario Schifano's celebrated Monochromi - the pioneering series of monochrome enamel paintings that established the artist's reputation as the leading Italian painter of his age when he exhibited them for the first time at the Galleria La Salita and the Venice Biennale in 1960. Seemingly comprised of two highly textural monochrome blocks of dark opaque colour overlaying a pale contrasting ground, this work, also executed in Schifano's groundbreaking and watershed year of 1960, is a major triptych-like sequence of monochromes that marks the artist's emergence at the forefront of Italian painting at this time.
Schifano's Monochromi developed in response to the earlier informel-inspired paintings he had made in the late 1950s. These earlier paintings were ones in which, often using a cement base, Schifano had scratched into the predominantly monochrome base of the work to create tactile incisions that articulate the material nature of painting and in some respects recall the explorations of Alberto Burri. In 1958 Schifano had exhibited at the Galleria Appia Antica in Rome alongside Francesco Lo Savio and Piero Manzoni but it was only in 1959 at another group exhibition at the Gallaeria La Salita alongside artists who with him would come to form the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo (Lo Savio, Tano Festa, Franco Angeli and Guiseppe Uncini) that Schifano came to critical prominence. The emergence of the first Monochromi in 1960 signified both a culmination of his recent work and a new beginning.
Marking both a rejection of his earlier informel tendency and an extension of its preoccupation with the plastic and material nature of painting into an open expression of itself, Schifano's Monochromi developed the highly tactile painterly surfaces of his previous work and presented it as a primal entity - an energised field of painterliness signifying little other than itself. Beginning with works that were solely blocks of pure monochrome colour, Schifano's Monochromi became what one critic has described as 'screens... of departure' and 'spaces of negated events'.(Giuseppe Bonini, writing in Achille Bonito Oliva ed. Mario Schifano, 1998, Milan, p. 206). Schifano himself described his Monochromi as 'primal', 'signs of energy' and 'empty images' beyond 'cultural intention'. 'At first I used to paint with a very few colours', he recalled in 1972, 'because my work expressed the idea of the emblematic, of street signs, of perceptual phenomena, of primal things. I thought that painting meant starting from something absolutely primal... I would paint works like this: with blue, with red, with yellow, with greenthese were signs of energy... with nothing in them, empty images () that went beyond any cultural intention. They wanted to be only themselves' (Mario Schifano in an interview with Enzo Siciliano, (trans. F. Luino), 'Lui ama Nancy la fotografa', Il Mondo, 16th November 1972)
Anticipating much of the form and logic of the Minimalist and Conceptual approach to painting that would dominate so much of the latter part of the 1960s, Senza titolo manifests itself almost as if it is an object presenting the act of painting as a kind of logical and methodical progression of becoming and dissolving - a moving or operating in the unique space between form and formlessness. The painting does this by taking a tripartite form comprised of three monochrome blocks of enamel colour, the first two seemingly labelled 'one' and 'two' and the third being solely of a monochrome cream block - an apparently infinite or empty field of the same colour as the small numerals on the first two. In this way a simplistic formal hint at a progression towards infinity or nothingness is subtly conveyed. The work's clear emphasis on the carefree texture of the applied paint, its two-tone colouring and its dry seemingly conceptual deconstruction of the painterly process to the point where it consists of solely of a simple numerical system and of colouring-in, clearly also echoes the painterly approach of an artist like Jasper Johns, whom Schifano greatly admired. In a development from Johns' work however, Senza titolo also seems - through the logic of its loose painterly application within strict numerical and geometric confines - to assert itself as near authorless or perhaps self-authoring creation. Within the strict boundaries and formal structure that the painting has set for itself however, Schifano has revelled in a degree of freedom in the way in which he has slapped and pulled the uniformly coloured enamel paint onto the surface allowing it to drip and splash in a loose and open way that appears to belie or undermine the apparent rationale of its formal logic and structure. Characteristic of the Monochromi as a whole, it is in this way too that the two black monochromatic panels appear as, as much a negating of the canvas surface of the work as they are an assertion of painterly form.
It was the Monochromi that first brought Schifano to the attention of Illeana Sonnabend with whom Schifano exhibited at her Paris gallery in 1962 and 1963. Such was Sonnabend's enthusiasm for these works that she was outraged with the artist in 1963 when he announced to her that he was moving on from these works and didn't want to make any more subsequently breaking off all relations with him.