Untitled

‘I think friendship is the eternal summer,’ Jef Verheyen (1932-1984) once wrote in a letter to a friend (J. Verheyen to Eberhard Fiebig, Antwerp, 14 December 1970, Eperhard Fiebig Archive, Kassel). The present work, a large monochromatic painting of atmospheric browns, speaks to this sentiment through its dedication to Lucio Fontana on the reverse. Verheyen had first become familiar with Fontana’s work in 1956, but it was only during his stay in Milan in 1957 that he and Fontana finally met. ‘When I met Fontana for the first time, we both felt there was an instant and spontaneous connection. Fontana was like a father or an older brother to me. I learned so much from him. But you could also turn the whole thing around and ask what Fontana learned from me. For example, once he had seen my canvases, he would only buy his own canvases in Flanders. He also borrowed some of my painting techniques. It was all about give and take. You simply can’t separate one from the other… It wasn’t just by chance that the two of us immediately clicked. We were pursuing the same ideas, and we discussed a lot of them by letter’ (J. Verheyen, quoted in interview with Reinhard Bentmann, Susanne Müller-Hanpft and Hannah Weitemeier-Steckel, 2 February 1973, published in “Essentialism is the Rhythm of Life” — Interview with Jef Verheyen, Le Peintre Flamant, Neuss 2010, p. 5).
Untitled, painted in 1958-1959, is one of the first paintings Verheyen created representing the very ideas he put forward in his own manifesto, Essentialisme, concocted in 1958 and published in Het Kahier, in 1959. Essentialisme marked Verheyen’s shift to monochromatic paintings, and he demonstrated this in the coming years with experiments in dark blue, grey and brown planes. Untitled numbers among them.
Verheyen’s shift to monochromatic paintings in the late 1950s was in the spirit of the European post-war ZERO movement to which he belonged, with its emphasis on the purity of light and colour. The sentiment Verheyen held for Fontana as a father was likewise shared by many within the group, who viewed him as a sort of theoretical pater familias, citing his 1946 manifesto Tabula Rasa as a sort of proto-document of origin for ZERO.
Verheyen felt closely connected not only to Fontana, but also to Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein, fellow travellers within the ZERO movement. ‘We grappled with the problem of how to go beyond Tachism and Art Informel. What mattered more to us was to create consciousness-raising painting. We had turned against Abstract Expressionism. The four of us — Fontana, Yves Klein, Manzoni and I — responded to it with a collective idea’ (Jef Verheyen, quoted in interview with Reinhard Bentmann, 2 February 1973). However, Verheyen differed from the rest by placing himself and his non-representational art within the figurative tradition of Netherlandish art: ‘Vermeer, Van Eyck and I perceive nature in a similar way. Our depiction of the natural world has nothing to do with the natural landscape, but with an eternal rhythm. (Verheyen, quoted in interview with Reinhard Bentmann, 2 February 1973). Verheyen viewed the connection between his monochromatic paintings and those of the Netherlandish masters as one based on a single, pulsating eternal characteristic of the natural world: colour. In another manifesto published in 1959, Pour une Peinture non-Plastique (For a non-plastic Painting), Verheyen defended colour recognition as an exact science which necessitated study from willing artists. The present work is a testament to Verheyen’s method and theory: by building up paint in translucent layers to produce subtle variations in colour, he built on the very same method applied by Jan van Eyck and, together with Fontana and other ZERO artists, strove towards purity of essence, space and form. Untitled offers its viewers a concept at the very core of Verheyen’s and ZERO’s aesthetic principles: the unending, and absolute truth of colour.