.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 1956, La scheggia (Splinter), is one of the first of Afro's mature works which demonstrate the artist's painting emerging from under the influence of others and forging a unique and dynamic style all of its own. Exhibited as a part of Afro's groundbreaking and highly successful show at the 1956 Venice Biennale, and featured in a major article on his work in Arti Visive (op. cit.), La scheggia is a leading example of the artist's work from this vital and important period.
This new and unique abstract style of painting emerged from under a wide variety of sources and influences. Afro was one of the first Italian painters to fully absorb Abstract Expressionism and to incorporate its influence into his work. As a result, his art forms an important link between the American and Italian avant-garde of the 1950s. Afro was the first Italian artist to forge direct contact with the artists of the New York school and during the 1950s he developed particularly close friendship with Willem de Kooning. Both artists shared a heavy debt to the pioneering abstract morphology of de Kooning's friend and mentor Arshile Gorky and it was the basic pictorial logic of Gorky's art that came to underpin much of the development of both painters' increasingly abstract work throughout the 1950s.
Emerging from the twin influences of Gorky and Picasso, between 1956 and 1957 Afro devised a new painterly method that developed the emotional morphology of Gorky and the tachiste sense of surface of the Informel movement in Europe into a new hybrid of abstract form, colour and gesture. While still rooted in the objective world of figuration, Afro developed in these new paintings an essentially abstract and 'pure' form of painting in which a unique sense of the freedom of painterly gesture and expression immediately came to the fore. Colour, form, and brushstroke were merged into tight abstract structures that, though seemingly non-objective, seemed to embody and reflect the physical properties of the 'real' world.
After an exhibition of these new works in California in 1958, G. Graziani argued that 'it is impossible to make literature about these works. They are paintings. They exist on canvas within their frames. They convey richness without luxury, vigour without explosion; and they hold reason and improvisation in admirable balance' ('This World' , 27 April 1958, op. cit., 1997, p. 399).
This new and unique abstract style of painting emerged from under a wide variety of sources and influences. Afro was one of the first Italian painters to fully absorb Abstract Expressionism and to incorporate its influence into his work. As a result, his art forms an important link between the American and Italian avant-garde of the 1950s. Afro was the first Italian artist to forge direct contact with the artists of the New York school and during the 1950s he developed particularly close friendship with Willem de Kooning. Both artists shared a heavy debt to the pioneering abstract morphology of de Kooning's friend and mentor Arshile Gorky and it was the basic pictorial logic of Gorky's art that came to underpin much of the development of both painters' increasingly abstract work throughout the 1950s.
Emerging from the twin influences of Gorky and Picasso, between 1956 and 1957 Afro devised a new painterly method that developed the emotional morphology of Gorky and the tachiste sense of surface of the Informel movement in Europe into a new hybrid of abstract form, colour and gesture. While still rooted in the objective world of figuration, Afro developed in these new paintings an essentially abstract and 'pure' form of painting in which a unique sense of the freedom of painterly gesture and expression immediately came to the fore. Colour, form, and brushstroke were merged into tight abstract structures that, though seemingly non-objective, seemed to embody and reflect the physical properties of the 'real' world.
After an exhibition of these new works in California in 1958, G. Graziani argued that 'it is impossible to make literature about these works. They are paintings. They exist on canvas within their frames. They convey richness without luxury, vigour without explosion; and they hold reason and improvisation in admirable balance' ('This World' , 27 April 1958, op. cit., 1997, p. 399).