Schifano’s schematic forms became
increasingly defined as the field;
the rectangular canvases with rounded corners
resembled a screen ready for reception,
or a video just switched on and warming up;
or, if you will, the viewfinder on a reflex camera
which has to delineate a specific view...
(M. Calvesi, exh. catalogue, Galleria Odyssia, Rome 1963)
Gió Marconi gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Mario Schifano. Something else, dedicated to a group of monochromes from between 1960 and 1962, curated by Alberto Salvadori and in collaboration with the Mario Schifano Archive.
Schifano began to make these industrial enamel paintings on canvas-backed paper in 1959, after earlier experiments in Informalism. He first presented them in 1960 at Galleria La Salita in Rome, in the group exhibition 5 pittori, which he shared with Giuseppe Uncini, Tano Festa, Francesco Lo Savio and Franco Angeli, and later in a solo show at the Tartaruga gallery in 1961.
Ahead of other artists working in Rome at the time, Schifano not only intended his monochromes to empty the surface of the painting, partly as a reaction to Informalism, but also to attribute it with another point of view, to ‘frame’ it, to propose a new way of seeing and painting.
Maurizio Calvesi was the first to understand that the surface of the monochromes was simply a screen, as he commented in the Galleria Odyssia exhibition catalogue in 1963: ‘They were highly original paintings with only one or two colours to cover the entire surface of the rectangle, or two rectangles juxtaposed... A number or several letters (but only at times) isolated or symmetrically placed; a lump in the paper, some drips, that was the total movement of the painting.’
As the common denominator of an entire generation of artists, from Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani to Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein, the monochrome was no novelty between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the ’60s, and Schifano was perfectly aware of this.
‘I thought painting meant starting from something absolutely primary’..., said Schifano, ‘The first all-yellow paintings with nothing in them, empty images, had nothing they wanted to say. They diverged from any cultural intention. They wanted to be themselves... Making a yellow painting was just making a yellow painting, that was all.’
Zeroing the gesture and meaning was therefore a simple pretext for making a painting that started from scratch, opening the way for something different. The grammar of Schifano’s monochromes is very simple: industrial enamels with a glossy, covering effect; ‘dripping’ colour spread freely and unevenly on the rough surface of wrapping paper. The intention was to give the idea of a billboard painting.
The surface of the paintings with their bright colours and absence of tonalities, similar to a photographic plate, heralded the emergence of new images: it was a new space for investigation, a field of germination which was ready to produce something else.
The exhibition’s emblematic title refers to a work from 1960, made by Schifano when he was just twenty-six, and also to a polyptych from 1962, which is among the works on show.
With the effective conciseness of an advertising message, Something Else (Something Else) was perhaps meant to indicate that what the artist intended to paint had to be different from what was already available, but it was also a mission statement expressed in two words: the monochrome, denoting a tabula rasa, was ready to be transformed into a projection zone, a photographic field for focusing on details, particulars and fractions of images.
Something Else has an almost prophetic flavour, considering that these ‘screens’ were soon to be filled with new signs of modern life. It is in the light of all this that the exhibition focuses on monochromes, sixty years after their creation. They were a crucial step in Mario Schifano’s creative journey and the genesis of his artistic invention.
The paintings will be accompanied by a group of works on paper from the same years, and to mark the occasion, a tabloid format newspaper of the exhibition will be published containing formerly unseen work by Schifano, together with contributions by Riccardo Venturi and Alberto Salvadori.