Surface 141

Capogrossi recalled the start of his activity: “I was ten years old and I was in Rome. One day, I went with my mother to an institute for the blind, where I saw two children drawing in one of the rooms. I approached them and noticed that their sheets of paper were filled with small black marks, like a sort of mysterious alphabet, but so vibrant that it moved me greatly, even though I had no real interest in art at that age.” The spatial criterion that the painter developed after the war, after the tonal painting practiced in the environment of the Scuola Romana, did not indicate a break with the past. It was part of a consistent process of evolution in which, striving to grasp the tension derived from being immersed in reality, in the light of the lesson learned at an early age from the two blind children, he sought to extract a single sign from the multiplicity of things. This process of condensation of reality is accompanied in his Surfaces by the extreme freedom of combination to which the sign is subjected, like a “sui generis serialism”. This brings a sense of organic proliferation to the regular grid of the geometrical pattern, made still more evident in the canvases in which windows or cuts characterised by different spatial and temporal relationships are superimposed on the already decomposed signic fabric, in accordance with the figurative method of collage. In Surface no. 141, the tonal and formal harmonies of the background – if it is still possible to speak of a relationship between background and figure – contrast with the segmental tears that traverse the structure of the canvas from top to bottom and from left to right, justifying, at a perceptive level, a two-fold interpretation in terms of direction and speed.