Piero Manzoni

With its lyrical symmetry and cascading horizontal pleats, Achrome from circa 1959 is a quietly magnificent example of Piero Manzoni's groundbreaking contribution to art history. In this perfectly balanced work, the progression of the composition is marked by two broad parallel bands of chalky folds, punctuated in the centre by a flat hiatus that dissects the composition horizontally with all the sonority of one of Barnett Newman's 'zips'. The harmonious beauty of the seemingly organic tiers of kaolin-soaked canvas, however, belie a much deeper conceptual premise and manifest his separateness from the art-making process.

Executed at a time when Abstract Expressionism was at the height of its hegemony in America and the European art scene was dominated by the Informel painters, Manzoni sought to divest the painted surface of its obligation to exist as a reservoir for artists' existentialist outpourings. Over the previous decade, painting had become gestural and magmatic, defined by action and formlessness. In revolt against the personal and social responsibilities ascribed to the painting process, Manzoni emphasised the surface and materials as the true subject of the work, a legacy that has continued to influence international art trends throughout the second half of the 20th century: "We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental scenography.  It is an arena of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images. Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain or express, but only for which they are: to be." (Piero Manzoni, For the Discovery of a Zone of Images, Milan 1957, n.p.)

Manzoni's solution to pictorial unity was the Achrome, first conceived in 1956, an un-emotive, white, neutral surface, which avoids and denies imagery in favour of a more radical purity. Liberated from all chromatic or figurative implications and freed of all allusive and descriptive, allegorical and symbolic input, Manzoni's mute, colourless constructions express nothing but their own existence. To create the Achrome, Manzoni soaked canvases initially in plaster and later in kaolin, allowing the canvases to dry and assume their final form independently, thereby removing the hand of the artist that had become the hallmark of expression. Instead, Manzoni sought to tap into the inherent expressive properties of the materials themselves. Manzoni discovered kaolin in 1958, around the time that this work was made, finding it allowed him to make the ideal Achrome surface. Applied to the loose pleats of the canvas, its chalky materiality and its colourlessness enhanced a sense of the canvas actively expressing itself. Although Manzoni continued to experiment with different materials (felt and cotton in 1960, wool and rabbit fur in 1961, and gravel and bread rolls in 1962) in order to investigate the limitations and possibilities of the painted surface, it is the kaolin on pleated canvas that embodies at its best the artist's attempt to minimize any sense of his own personality or gesture that might contaminate the purity of the image. It is through the drying process that the work achieves its final form, without the intervention of the artist, who leaves the last stages of creation to the medium itself. Diametrically opposed to 'action' painting, in Manzoni's hands Achrome eliminates all autobiography and does away with the personal mystique of the artist, becoming a work endowed with its own autonomous existence.