The Artwork of the Month - October 2022

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Capogrossi (1900-1972), the column "Work of the Month" is dedicated to one of the works in the collection of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna that can be attributed to this great master, father of Informal painting and pioneer of Italian abstractist research.

In Superficie 572, the pictorial space is subdivided by a grid of horizontal and vertical lines, thin or wide, linear or indented, that identify squares of varying sizes on which are applied collage inserts with the characteristic toothed shape, a formal element that distinguished the artist from the early 1950s.

After completing his studies in Law, Capogrossi devoted himself to painting from the 1920s, training at Felice Carena's prestigious Libera scuola di Nudo. After a long figurative phase within the tonalism of the Roman School and a brief cubist season (1947-49), he moved towards an increasing synthesis and dissolution of the image, leading to an essential and reduced sign. The new production, presented in Rome at the Galleria del Secolo in January 1950, was already distinguished by that unmistakable sign, geometric and indented, which Corrado Cagli, in presenting his personal exhibition, interpreted in a symbolic key, emphasising, in the light of Jungian writings, its unconscious and primordial component. The new linguistic proposal naturally brought Capogrossi closer to the abstract-informal research that Pollock, De Kooning, Fautrier, Wols and Dubuffet were developing at the same time in Europe and the United States, with whom the Italian artist participated in the Parisian exhibition Véhémences confrontées (1951) curated by Michel Tapié.

As the years went by, the surfaces became more and more complex and organised, the essentiality of black and white was joined by colours, in the consistency of a sign that is at once sparse and rich, recognisable and versatile, capable of infinite variations, dimensions, combinations and rhythmic accents. A sign that does not serve a naturalistic "representation" but has in itself its own raison d'être, its own communicative effectiveness, its own material consistency, opening up to possible interpretative suggestions.
Superficie 572 was purchased by the Municipality of Rome in 1968 and is the only abstract work by Capogrossi in the civic collections. Four other paintings in the collection - Ping-Pong Player (1931), Giuochi (1935), Rustic Objects (1939) and Roman Landscape (1939) - instead refer to the figurative season.

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