LAUSANNE.- The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne is presenting the first museum exhibition in Switzerland of the work of Piero Manzoni (1933–1963). Centred on the Achromes – the white monochromes the artist worked on during his brief career (1957– 1963) – the exhibition comprises 70 outstanding works ranging from the famous wrinkled canvases to the final polystyrene pieces, not to mention his few sculptures and works on paper.

A major figure on the art scene of the 1950s–1960s, Manzoni enjoys the same status as Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein as one of the most innovative artists of the time. Like them he experimented with monochrome, but took the concept further by opting for the a-chromatic: the very absence of colour.

Driven by a determination to free the work of art from the painterly tradition and from the action-painting approach that dominated postwar Informal art and Lyrical Abstraction, he opted for minimal types of intervention (folding, coating, sewing) that gave rise to simple forms (pleats, lines, grids), and for natural and synthetic white materials including wrinkled canvas soaked in white clay solution, cotton wool, synthetic fur, bread rolls and polystyrene pellets. Leaving these materials free to react in their own specific ways, he transformed the picture into a space of infinite possibilities.

The exhibition comprises some 70 Achromes in separate series. This presentation allows us to retrace the evolution of the concept of achromia and illustrates the development and recurrence of the systems used to underscore the possibilities of each material.

Plaster
In 1956 Manzoni was already imagining the work of art as an «authentic, pristine zone» stripped of all «useless gestures». The results were canvases coated with raw plaster – rough, incised surfaces – and first shown in March–April 1958 at the Galleria del Circolo di Cultura in Bologna. The artist applied a minimal composition principle, most often in the form of a line dividing the canvas into two unequal areas.

Wrinkled canvas and kaolin
In 1958, Manzoni began what would be, quantitatively, his largest series: the Achromes made of wrinkled canvas coated with a mix of glue and kaolin, a naturally very white clay used in the production of porcelain. This series in relief was the first suggestion of an ambiguous status for the Achromes, between painting and sculpture.

Squared canvas and kaolin
Far from a straightforward tabula rasa, Manzoni’s achromia was fertile ground that he began cultivating in 1959 in a new series of Achromes made of ragged squared canvas soaked in a mix of kaolin and glue and laid out in a precise, repetitive sequence, on another canvas. This grid allowed the artist to introduce the notion of infinity, not as a metaphysical concept but rather as a physical principle of modular repetition. Nonetheless, the works’ strict geometry is tempered by the organic nature of the kaolin.

Sewn canvas/Paper
In 1959–1960, Manzoni embarked on a fresh series of Achromes using a sewing machine. In a radical adaptation of the non-colour principle, each canvas was crisscrossed with stitching that formed a grid, with some areas flat and others raised. Manzoni also drew on the naturally achromatic character of paper, applying the organisational principles already used for his canvas Achromes: horizontal pleats running across the middle, and juxtaposition of squares.

Sculpture
In 1960–1961 the painting/sculpture ambiguity already present in the wrinkled canvas Achromes was pushed still further in a number of explicitly three-dimensional works. Manzoni created numerous «object»-related works, but only a very few were titled Achromes. Of different types and shapes, they are characterised by the same white colouration: most of them are coated with kaolin, which puts them in the achromatic category and excludes them from the status of readymades.

Cotton wool
The use of cotton wool for a new group of Achromes in 1960–1961 marked the beginning of experiments in which Manzoni gave up working in two dimensions. Here he returns to the grid principle applied in the previous series, but with a manufactured product – squares or balls of cotton wool – arranged edge to edge. Soft and unstable, this material is ill adapted to the strict geometry of the grid, and disrupts its rigidity and contours.

Bread rolls
Several works dating from around 1962 are made from typically Milanese bread rolls. By coating them with kaolin, which solidifies them and gives them a sculptural, achromatic quality, Manzoni strips them of any readymade character. In this series he resorts once more to the grid, whose geometry is violated by the bread’s organic nature, lumpy surface and irregular shape.

Cobalt chloride/Phosphorescent varnish
Around 1960, Manzoni began exploring the notion of achromia as chromatic indeterminacy. In one instance he played on the chromatic instability of cobalt chloride, whose colour varies from pink to blue according to the ambient humidity and temperature. The Achromes made of expanded polystyrene and coated with a phosphorescent varnish that emits light in darkness, proceed from the same dialectical relationship with their environment. They give expression to Manzoni’s quest for a living, autonomous artwork existing independently of any intervention by the artist.

Synthetic fibres
During a stay in Denmark in the autumn of 1961 Manzoni experimented with synthetic fibres like polyester and nylon at the Angli shirt factory in Herning. Some of these fibres play on organic/synthetic ambiguity: when short they resemble fur, in an ambiguity that is all the more striking in that at the same time Manzoni made a sculpture out of real rabbit skin. Coated with an antistatic product, long fibres float like “clouds”: here the Achrome no longer has definite contours and comes to look like an organic object.

Package
Made around 1962, this doubly mysterious series is made of unknown objects covered with wrapping paper or newspaper, and tied up and sealed like postage parcels. We can identify two kinds of packages, however: soft ones, doubtless containing cotton wool, and hard, more angular ones, probably with cardboard boxes inside. The two different types come in pairs, in a play on the contrast between opposites. Although he at first reserved the term “achrome” for his white pictures, Manzoni broadens its scope here, applying it to multicoloured works midway between painting and sculpture and far removed from his initial monochromes.

Pebbles/Polystyrene pellets
In 1962, Manzoni abandoned the grid surfaces he had mainly worked with in favour of an all-over spread of kaolin-coated pebbles or polystyrene pellets. This saturation of the picture refers back to some of the early Achromes for which he used a more or less uniform spreading of plaster.