Kounellis

After a period in which letters and symbols are the protagonists of his paintings, during in the mid-sixties, he replaces canvas for steel plates, having assumed the end of the picture as a support and converts space without dimensions into the physical limit of his pieces. Kounellis considers that this break - whose genealogy is said to have begun with Marcel Duchamp and continued with Jackson Pollock - is a change in the order of the physical dimensions: the relationship between art and reality through the object, in the case of the former, and a final break with easel painting, in the case of American. His installation in Italy leads him to reclaim and recover traditional pictorial values, such as anthropometry, perspective and a strong sense of order and balance. Furthermore, the inclusion of nature in his pieces (wood, coal, cactus, birds) does not imply an appeal to the ideal, but reveals the manipulation of man.

Kounellis’ project, seen as a whole from fifty works collected together, is based on the critical use of materials and objects, with which he manifests extreme tension, thus appealing to perception and spectator participation. These tensions arise from the contrast of the qualities and nature of the materials (rails and felt blankets, cotton caught on iron plates), as well as the paradoxical combination of them (scales with coffee powder, a closet full of stone slabs), which in many cases, refer to the rhetoric of conceptual art. There lies the dramatic sense that he attributes to his work (and which begins in spatial occupation): the obvious and air-tight human existence is displayed at the same time.