Piero Manzoni

"If the Achrome is a painting without, it can be assumed as a shell inhabited by no identity, alone in its receptivity, denied to pleasure, gesture and history. It is pure visual language though which art speaks of itself. It expresses the same in various ways, making itself a ceremony of the irradiation of a material that is both splendid and luminous."

(Germano Celant in Exhibition Catalogue, Naples, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Manzoni, 2007, p. 31)

Executed in 1959, Achrome is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful works from the iconic series ever to appear at auction. Radiating energy through the tight folds of the kaolin, and resplendent in its white incandescence, Achrome embodies both Manzoni's groundbreaking material innovations and his revolutionary artistic philosophy.

Manzoni executed his first Achrome in 1956 and in doing so he rejected the existential and empirical questions with which his contemporaries were engaged. The Achrome was a blank slate, a mute surface devoid of narrative, description, symbolism and allegory. Constituting an elementary sign, the Achrome did not signify or represent anything but its own existence.  It recognized the individual character of the canvas and the material that covers it as an autonomous being in its own right. While Abstract Expressionism was at the height of its domination in America and the European art scene was governed by the Informel painters, Manzoni disassociated the painted surface from the active participation of the artist. Germano Celant describes the Achrome as 'the maximum magnification of the visible, which expresses itself with blinding candour, undressing and depersonalising the painting, as if it existed of its own light." (Exhibition Catalogue, Naples, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Manzoni, 2007, p. 30).

With the Achromes it was almost as though Manzoni wanted to freeze painting; to suspend the composing elements rather than consume or transform them.  Structured as a 'non-picture', the Achrome was composed via the exposure and drying process of the 'virgin' canvas. In the present work, the pleats, cascading in sensuous folds and rivets down the canvas, are the exquisite result of the spontaneous action of the kaolin. This material, first used by Manzoni in 1958, is not an impasto, as it is the case for the White Monochromes by his contemporary Yves Klein. It does not require brushing, pouring or physical manipulation as with the 'action' painters of Abstract Expressionism. Rather, Manzoni would first glue the canvas into a seemingly organic arrangement of self-proliferating folds and creases, before the chalky colourless kaolin solution was applied over the top. Even whiter and purer than the canvas ground beneath, the kaolin not only removed the trace of his hand but enhanced the depth and plasticity of the surface undulations.  The resultant enigmatic work, with its torrent of tightly wrought folds, seems to harbour a dynamic energy within the gathers of the canvas, suggestive of a living, vibrant entity. Ultimately it is through the self-defining drying process, without the artist's intervention, that the work achieves its final form.

The present Achrome is an exceptional example of Manzoni's unique approach to the art work. The magnificent, rich and multi-layered surface texture evokes the great art of the past. The chromatic homogeneity of the kaolin is akin the untainted purity of virginal white plaster or, even more striking, to the cold white marble of Renaissance sculpture.  Viewed beside Michelangelo's masterpiece, Pietà, the undulating expanse of rhythmical channels in Achrome seems to reflect the mesmerising metamorphosis of marble into cloth which defines Michelangelo's sculptural genius. The tactile folds of the Madonna's drapery and the soft cocoon of Christ's shroud emerge from the block through a process of reductive chiselling. In both the Achrome and the Pietà, it is the raw material of kaolin and marble and their intrinsic chromatic harmony which create facets where the radiance of natural light is reflected and absorbed.  The intricate complexity of both surfaces creates dramatic chiaroscuro which seduces our eye, as light and shadow are strikingly juxtaposed.

During a tragically short life that was cut short when he was only thirty, well ahead of his time, Manzoni adopted a fundamentally conceptual approach to making and viewing art, emphasising the surface and materials as the true subject of the work.   His innovations anticipated both Conceptualism and Arte Povera, and his legacy has continued to influence international art trends throughout the second half of the 20^th century. In the creation of the Achromes, Manzoni awakened an area of creativity in which the painting's subject was its own self-generating form: he wrote in 1960, "The artist has achieved integral freedom; pure material becomes pure energy; all problems of artistic criticism are surmounted; everything is permitted" (Piero Manzoni, 'Free Dimension', Azimuth, no. 2, Milan 1960).