.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This untitled work from 1984 with its wax-covered wire mesh panel, iron shelving and sequence of scale-like supports holding small piles of freshly ground coffee is an important 'painting' made by Kounellis as a variation on the theme of one of his most important and memorable early works. In 1969, Kounellis presented a work at the Modern Art Agency in Naples that consisted solely of eight scale-like shelves holding fresh ground coffee in a sequential vertical progression of the kind that hangs in front of the wax covered panel of this work.
Kounellis' introduction of the undeniably real element of the coffee into the work is a simple, direct and typical move by the artist who often included living, organic and olfactory elements into his work as a formal extension the art of painting into the realm of the real world. The existential fact of coffee, emanating and extending beyond the work itself, into the room and the senses of the viewer through its strong and recognisable aroma was an element of key importance for the artist. Towards this end the coffee was replaced on a daily basis for the duration of the exhibition. On a personal level, the coffee and the sales used for weighing commodities recalled for Kounellis the atmosphere of travel and of goods in permanent transit that he had known growing up in the port of Piraeus. His use of the aroma of the coffee to extend beyond the work parallels his belief in invoking an eternal and archaic poetry that he believes exists as a kind of 'golden thread' extending throughout all Mediterranean culture from ancient to modern times. It was partly for this reason that he reprised this work on one occasion as an installation inside the hold of a cargo ship.
This ethereal nature of coffee and its aroma - its ability to travel and permeate - is seemingly weighed in Kounellis' work and calculated by the sequential progression of iron scales holding it. It is a combination of apparent opposites that has a peculiar poetical resonance which the viewer can feel but not necessarily explain. This laterworking of the same theme from 1984 invokes an even broader sense of weight, calculation and gravity. Here Kounellis has demonstrably incorporated the motif of the shelf/scales back into the pictorial logic of a painting by suspending them and another denser heavier, but empty row of iron shelves from a canvas-like but in fact dripped wax-covered platform made of steel mesh.
Kounellis' introduction of the undeniably real element of the coffee into the work is a simple, direct and typical move by the artist who often included living, organic and olfactory elements into his work as a formal extension the art of painting into the realm of the real world. The existential fact of coffee, emanating and extending beyond the work itself, into the room and the senses of the viewer through its strong and recognisable aroma was an element of key importance for the artist. Towards this end the coffee was replaced on a daily basis for the duration of the exhibition. On a personal level, the coffee and the sales used for weighing commodities recalled for Kounellis the atmosphere of travel and of goods in permanent transit that he had known growing up in the port of Piraeus. His use of the aroma of the coffee to extend beyond the work parallels his belief in invoking an eternal and archaic poetry that he believes exists as a kind of 'golden thread' extending throughout all Mediterranean culture from ancient to modern times. It was partly for this reason that he reprised this work on one occasion as an installation inside the hold of a cargo ship.
This ethereal nature of coffee and its aroma - its ability to travel and permeate - is seemingly weighed in Kounellis' work and calculated by the sequential progression of iron scales holding it. It is a combination of apparent opposites that has a peculiar poetical resonance which the viewer can feel but not necessarily explain. This laterworking of the same theme from 1984 invokes an even broader sense of weight, calculation and gravity. Here Kounellis has demonstrably incorporated the motif of the shelf/scales back into the pictorial logic of a painting by suspending them and another denser heavier, but empty row of iron shelves from a canvas-like but in fact dripped wax-covered platform made of steel mesh.