Afro

Galleria Schneider, Rome
Joseph Mazer Collection, New York
Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles
Galleria dello Scudo, Verona
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003

Mario Graziani, Afro, Rome 1997, no. 400, p. 183, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is evident under ultra-violet light.
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"I accepted the fact that the pictorial image realised itself in an organic and unexpected way, that the forms expand in a disquieting way, that the colours may take on a life of their own" (Afro cited in: Pittori Italiani d'Oggi, Rome, 1958, pp. 93-94).

Magisterially deployed in l'Uccello di Fuoco, these are the characteristics that define Afro's mature style. Executed in 1957, the present work is one of the finest examples of Afro's signature lyrical abstraction.  A powerful sense of chromatic and compositional balance is struck by the bold brush strokes that rhythmically dance across the pictorial surface. Set against a variegated landscape of fiery red and diaphanous cream, punctuated with accents of electric blue and dark brown, these powerful gestural strokes draw our gaze into the composition, establishing a dramatic impression of depth. With l'Uccello di Fuoco Afro delicately transforms subconscious impulses into a subjective vision of reality through the autonomous force of gesture, delicately negotiating between subjective expression and an objective metaphysical naturalism.

At the time of this work's creation Afro was at the peak of his artistic maturity and career. Having won the prize for the Venice Biennale in 1956, Afro was thereafter prominently commissioned to work on the mural Il Giardino della Speranza (Garden of Hope) alongside Arp, Miró, Calder, Moore and Picasso for the new Unesco Headquarters in Paris.  In 1957 he travelled to the United States, taking up a position as teacher and artist in residence at Mills College in Oakland, and held a solo exhibition at the Viviano Gallery in New York to high critical acclaim.  By experimenting with more spontaneous and less contrived gesture, l'Uccello di Fuoco represents an extraordinary example of his poetic evolution through an emotive engagement with the American art scene.  During their respective visits to Rome, Afro met most of the leading artists associated with the movement, drawing particular inspiration from the paintings of De Kooning, Pollock, and Twombly; encounters that liberated Afro to explore a similar sense of gestural freedom in his own work, in an ongoing pursuit for the purity of expression. Commenting on the profound effect that post-war American art had on the development of his style, Afro wrote: "The American artists live through their paintings, affirming their human conscience.  They have thus given new life to a set of values and beliefs that, though born in Europe, were beginning to become sterile through complacency and mannerisms." (Ibid).  Nonetheless, it was the work of the late Arshile Gorky that influenced the artist most significantly in the development of his expressive style. 

In tandem with the execution of this work in 1957, Afro curated a Gorky retrospective at the Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome.  Fascinated by Gorky's surreal aesthetic since his first visit to the United States in 1950, Afro described the importance of Gorky for his own practice in the show's exhibition catalogue: "Intrepid, emotional, full of love, Gorky taught me to research the truth without false modesty, ambition and formal hesitation.  From him I learnt more than from everyone else to research only inside me: where all images are still rooted in their obscure origins and unconscious truthfulness." (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, Galleria dell'Obelisco, Arshile Gorky, 1957, n.p.).  Poetical and timeless, Afro's pictorial atmospheres also reveal an assimilation of the artistic legacy of Analytical Cubism and Expressionism of European artists such as Picasso and Paul Klee.  Thus, possessing a visual language immensely wide-reaching in scope, by 1957 Afro had moved on from postwar Italy and cemented his reputation as a truly international artist. Representative of this artistic maturity, l'Uccello di Fuoco beautifully conveys Afro's remarkable ability to invigorate influences from the past with the immediacy of the present.

Unlike his earlier works from the 1950s in which the persistence of figuration is evident through carefully ordered compositions, the late 1950s attest to a more elemental expression conducted by the power of colour and gesture, free from the confines of subjective demands.  In l'Uccello di Fuoco the harmony of the colours and the dynamism of the forms are pervaded by a very tactile sense of light, which conveys an enchanting vigour met by a powerful sense of painterly gesture. In this exceptional work from the most important period for the artist, Afro achieves the harmonious tension and chromatic balance sought throughout his career: "His colour is sensuous, warm - never cold; fluid, not structural; free-edged, never sharply contoured. Light and colour, shadow and shape achieve a suggested space effect through their ordering and flood it with the glories of his great predecessors: this festive spirit, this celebration of light and life - of life through light."  (James Johnson Sweeney, Afro, 1961).