22.04.06 | 04.11.06

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Jannis Kounellis

Untitled

1967

Courtesy :

A hundred kilos of black, dirty coal, heaped against the wall and contained inthree perpendicular lines of white paint. The evocative power of these two elements is sufficient to produce a short circuit of the sensibility: an accumulation of dirty, heavy material, formed into an irregular circle, and the abstract whiteness of an incorporeal, Euclidean geometry. Unlike Gino de Dominicis, who in 1969 exhibited invisible cubes and cylinders – hence three-dimensional objects – marking their presence on the floor with a simple white line of paint and a label, Kounellis here combines the object and concept with a view to a new, original, reformulation of the idea of painting, no longer attached to the wall but placed on the floor. In this metamorphosis the architectural element of the wall acts as a connector, on which the coal leaves smudges and marks, as a memory of its vital passage. Reflecting on the contemporary experiments in conceptual art, Kounellis here confirms the necessity, for every further progress in thought and knowledge, of a material animated by an independent, inborn, creative energy.

Pireo 1936
In Kounellis’s earliest works one can already glimpse this tension between a search for historic and poetic identity and a desire to break with the status quo by opening ...
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