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Lot Essay
This is the first Manzoni to come into the house: a new and important conquest for our perception of art, for our "growth" in our way of confronting ourselves and conversing with the work. Fontana had already opened the way in our minds, so it was not difficult to engage with Manzoni's work, on the contrary, it seemed to be an obligatory step, which could reveal to us a new universe outside and inside ourselves.
I certainly can't begin to talk about Manzoni's art, I have a certain sense of shame when confronted by his extraordinary greatness. I can only say why we chose this "achrome". It is one of the most pure, most essential, of its kind: kaolin on squared canvas.
The triumph and the absolutism of the material, the one sought by the artist: the material "is", the painting "is". Nothing else, if not this lucid awareness of the self-determination of the material. The achrome emanates a sense of deep faith, almost religiosity, because there is enormous courage in a work of this kind: there is nothing that can captivate your sensibility, your imagination. There is only the life, seemingly inert, of the material isolated by the artist, so that it may assume its final, autonomous form in the drying process. But there is a will behind it, a subjective world, that wants to acquire new horizons, wants to break with the experiences of the past, wants to come beyond the surface, that is to say before the canvas, before the artist himself, to make space for the "object" par excellence: the material. And to give it a sense of sacredness, which we detect and attribute to its creator.
Versatile and unpredictable, Manzoni had many surprises in store for us, inside the collection and out. We owe him a great deal: also the present approach towards young artists.
I certainly can't begin to talk about Manzoni's art, I have a certain sense of shame when confronted by his extraordinary greatness. I can only say why we chose this "achrome". It is one of the most pure, most essential, of its kind: kaolin on squared canvas.
The triumph and the absolutism of the material, the one sought by the artist: the material "is", the painting "is". Nothing else, if not this lucid awareness of the self-determination of the material. The achrome emanates a sense of deep faith, almost religiosity, because there is enormous courage in a work of this kind: there is nothing that can captivate your sensibility, your imagination. There is only the life, seemingly inert, of the material isolated by the artist, so that it may assume its final, autonomous form in the drying process. But there is a will behind it, a subjective world, that wants to acquire new horizons, wants to break with the experiences of the past, wants to come beyond the surface, that is to say before the canvas, before the artist himself, to make space for the "object" par excellence: the material. And to give it a sense of sacredness, which we detect and attribute to its creator.
Versatile and unpredictable, Manzoni had many surprises in store for us, inside the collection and out. We owe him a great deal: also the present approach towards young artists.