Jannis Kounellis. Io sono un pittore

The Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati presents "Jannis Kounellis: Io sono un pittore". Curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, it is the first exhibition to explore the work of Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, 1936 - Rome, 2017) by specifically and systematically interpreting it in terms of painting practice. This approach forges an alternative critical perspective that is broader and more radical than the conventional view of the artist as one of the leading figures of Arte Povera, or as a master of installations and poet of matter, as he was often hailed.



The show's starting point and guiding theme is a simple phrase the artist often repeated: "I am a painter," a statement that has less to do with technique or medium, and more with his approach to reality. "The Greek term ζωγράφος (zōgráphos) — painter, literally "writer of life" – guided the entire curatorial project. Kounellis only painted on canvas in the conventional sense for a few years of his artistic career, but throughout his life he painted with iron, coal, fire, jute sacks and the aroma of coffee. He painted with space, silence, and the heritage of a Mediterranean civilization he felt was under threat. Yet to date, no exhibition has used painting as a lens through which to explore his work," explained the curator Vincenzo de Bellis.



The show in the Collezione Olgiati venue brings together more than 35 works by Jannis Kounellis dating from the late 1950s to 2014, including some previously unseen or rarely exhibited pieces, such as Untitled (Homage to Van Gogh) of 1991 and the Black Rose on paper with a silver spray-painted background of 1966, here on show for the first time. The exhibition does not proceed chronologically but rather is constructed around various themes – Painting as language; Painting as matter and weight; Painting as memory and silence; Painting as scene and icon – which, like communicating forcefields, are traversed by echoes and conversations between works which date from different periods but draw on profoundly similar ideas. The show also reveals the artist's highly relational view of painting, nurtured by visual conversations with some of the greats of art history, from Van Gogh to Malevič, Mondrian James Ensor and Hans Arp. Kounellis clearly staked his claim in this tradition, and though he continually transformed it, he never sought to turn his back on it. The themed sections span the whole of the artist's career, highlighting how his various obsessions are not limited to, or enclosed in a single stylistic period, but continue to resonate throughout his oeuvre, forever challenging the viewer.

Io sono un pittore, the exhibition layout



The exhibition at the Collezione Olgiati opens with the section dedicated to Painting as language, featuring works in which letters, numbers, signs and flowers serve as the components of a visual lexicon. Here, for Kounellis, paintings become a linguistic field: not images to contemplate, but statements to read. This section opens with a creation that is both a tribute and a provocation: a large black square painted directly on the wall, flanked by panels of 1958 enamelled with shop signage (Tobacco Shop) and numbers (Untitled, 1958 / 2012). Thus Malevich's Black Square, the defining work of suprematism, meets the streets of Rome, and life takes over the "zero point of painting", a confrontation that for Kounellis would never find resolution. 


If painting is language, even a rose can become an ideogram, the writing of nature in the art system, as can be seen in his famous series of Roses. The exhibition at the Collezione Olgiati showcases four works from this series, including the monumental Red Rose (1966-1967) and the very rare the Black Rose on paper with a silver spray-painted background (1966), exhibited for the very first time. 

In the works in the section entitled Painting as matter and weight, Kounellis paints by deploying the weight of the elements he chooses, from iron to coal, wool and smoke. The world is not represented, but enters the work, exerting its starkly concrete presence. The 2005 Untitled, for example, shows a field of cacti surrounded by rolls of lead: a dialogue between organic and metallic, slow growth and fixed boundary. 
In other pieces, canvas itself is the painter's material: in the large work of 1969, jute sacks and huge loops of white wool mark out the surface like a polyptych, while in that of 1967, four sacks physically take over the white surface - the heft of real life straddling and invading the artwork. 

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