Achrome

Executed circa 1958, the present work is an exquisite early example of the Achromes that defined Piero Manzoni's oeuvre. Begun in 1957, and pursued until his tragically premature death just six years later, these extraordinary colourless creations played a major role in the artistic landscape of the post-war Italian avant-garde. Manzoni created his Achromes by dipping creased canvas in kaolin—a white china clay—and allowing it to dry; the result was a series of wrinkled formations that were wholly self-defined, free from the burden of narrative and representation. While many of these took the form of straight, horizontal folds, the present work is distinguished by the wave-like pattern that undulates across the surface, creating a scintillating play of light and shadow. The late 1950s saw Manzoni take his place at the centre of Milan’s thriving contemporary art scene, establishing the magazine Azimuth and the accompanying Galleria Azimut with his friend Enrico Castellani in 1959. Along with the latter’s Superfici, and Lucio Fontana’s ground-breaking Tagli, Manzoni’s Achromes stood among the most iconic creations of this thrilling period, setting the stage for the international evolution of Minimal and Conceptual art over the following decade.

Manzoni had been inspired early on by Yves Klein’s landmark exhibition Proposte monochrome, epoca blu, held at the Galleria Apollinaire, Milan, in 1957. The French artist’s startling blue monochromes, which seemed to live and breathe entirely of their own accord, had a profound impact on Manzoni, who up until then had been working in a gestural painterly style. By allowing his Achromes to take their own form, he liberated them from influence of his hand, setting them free as independent, self-generating entities. Neither painting nor sculpture, and stripped of all representational qualities, they became hermetic statements of their own existence. For all their elemental purity, however, these works—much like Klein’s—retained something of a sacred, mystical dimension. Against its will, the present work evokes an ancient, fossilised relic, conjuring rippling water, stratified rock or the delicate folds of marble drapery. Manzoni would poke fun at this very notion in later conceptual works: notably Artist’s Breath (1960) and Socle du monde (1961), which, in post-Duchampian fashion, lampooned the auratic status we ascribe to art. So too would his later Achromes, which—alongside kaolin—began to incorporate everyday substances such as bread rolls and cotton wool.

In 1960, around two years after the present work, Manzoni published his seminal essay ‘Free Dimension’ in Azimuth. In it, he explained the guiding principle behind his Achromes. ‘I am quite unable to understand those painters who, whilst declaring an active interest in modern problems, still continue even today to confront a painting as if it was a surface to be filled with colour and forms’, he wrote; ‘… a surface of unlimited possibilities is now reduced to a kind of receptacle into which unnatural colours and artificial meanings are forced. Why shouldn’t this receptacle be emptied? Why shouldn’t this surface be freed? Why not seek to discover the unlimited meaning of total space, of pure and absolute light?’ (P. Manzoni, ‘Free Dimension’, Azimuth, no. 2, 1960, n.p.). Banishing the notion of the canvas as a support for art, and reconceiving it as the artwork in and of itself, would prove hugely influential to the generations that followed: from fellow Italians such as Agostino Bonalumi and Paolo Scheggi, to American artists such as Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. As centuries of illusionism slowly drained away, art was free to reveal a new kind of magic: the impossible, inarticulate wonder of simply being. The present work captures the moment of enlightenment when art truly looked its purpose in the eye, and resolved to start again.