Le città d'America

After his early neo-Cubist work, Afro visited the United States in 1950. This marked a key turning point for his art through contact with the new developments on the New York art scene and above all with the painting of Arshile Gorky, which was to exercise a crucial influence on his work. Afro was primarily interested in the investigation of the unconscious undertaken by the Surrealist school, to which Gorky belonged. It was in 1952, the year in which he painted the work exhibited here, that Afro began to abandon the construction method of splintered Cubist planes and adopt a freer approach in line with the abstract surrealists. The title of the work is a precise reference to this stay in America. Given the importance that Afro attached to memory in terms of the acquisition of a sense of reality, it is easy to see how the citation of Italian figurative elements, which emerge in abbreviated form from the background of the work to combine with the verticality of American architecture as rendered in lines of ochre and browns, makes this painting a real manifestation of the intimacy of remembrance. (Transl. by Paul Metcalfe per Scriptum, Roma)