"I would only like to add that the arts are 'none other' than manifestations of intelligence, the raison d'etre of 'man' can have no social evolution without the total evolution of man. I like your anxiety, your profoundly black, red and white paintings; they indicate your thinking, your fear. I can only wish you a 'happy' career and remind you to be humble, very humble, since in 'time' we are 'nothing'. - a letter from Lucio Fontana to fellow Italian artist Paolo Scheggi.
Curved Intersurface in Orange (1969)
Putting aside, for one moment, my flippant comment about Connect 4 and focusing more on Fontana's missive (whilst apophatically ignoring his extraordinary penchant for emphatic apostrophising), I was struck by how guarded Fontana's praise for Scheggi, forty years his junior, was. He almost seemed to be warning Scheggi against not just conceitedness and self-aggrandisement but even happiness itself.
As it transpired, Fontana need not have worried. Scheggi died in Rome in 1970, just thirty years old, after a spell of unspecified illness. Which means there's not a lot of his work knocking about. The Estorick's In Depth boasted of being the first British retrospective of Scheggi's career but, to be honest, it seems unlikely that either the Tate, the Royal Academy, or the Hayward were seriously interested.
Scheggi is too slight an artist. His stuff is good but his career is a footnote to far more stellar talents. To be fair though, these are the kind of shows the compact yet bijou Estorick excel at. With my art card it's less than the cost of a pint to go in and while I'm there I can have a look at some work by Giorgio di Chirico and Giorgio Morandi too. My two favourite Giorgios!
Reflected Zones (1964)
But first, Scheggi. Born in Florence, but Milanese by adoption, Scheggi was one of the key practitioners of Spatialism. Beneath Fontana of course. Fontana was the founder, godfather, and pretty much the only even reasonably well known artist in that movement. Fontana got a retrospective at the Hayward in 1999 (it was one of the first modern art exhibitions I ever attended). Scheggi, most certainly, did not.
Which is understandable. It was Fontana who had the idea of ripping open the canvas to show us what's behind it and to give us genuine three dimensionality. It was a shock tactic, in the same way - even more - than Jackson Pollock's jazzy drips, and, as with Pollock, it left those who sought to follow its track choking on the dust.
Shocks don't work if you keep repeating them. They're like a rubber ball bounced on a kitchen floor. The first time the ball will rebound pretty highly. After that it's the law of diminishing returns. So, Scheggi's work, colourful and playful though it is, can only suffer in comparison with Fontana's. In fact the light in the galley rendered the beautiful colours of Scheggi's canvases somewhat muted so even that's not come across so brilliantly here.
Polychrome Metal Sheet (1958)
Untitled (1959-60)
In Depth starts by showing us a couple of Scheggi's pre-Spatialist works from the late fifties. They're exercises in austere sheet metal and the materials of heavy industry. Scheggi's attempt to show that Italy is now an urban, modern society and to cast off images of cypress trees and olive plantations. They owe a debt, forever postponed, to Rauschenberg and Alberto Burri and they show that Scheggi's short life unfortunately prevented him from ever really finding the light away from the shade of his influences.
Of which Fontana, as we've already established, was the largest by far. Scheggi moved to London (at the time Paris was the preferred destination for young Italian artists) and came into contact with Ben Nicholson who also had an effect on his work. In Curved Intersurface in Light Blue you can see Scheggi has sought to find a happy medium between the violence of Fontana and the more measured abstraction of Nicholson.
Curved Intersurface in Light Blue (1966)
Units of Habitation (1967-68)
You couldn't really play Connect 4 (unless you're playing against somebody who is really shit at Connect 4) as it's only a 4x4 grid but it's aesthetically pleasing even though it won't detain you long. The straightened up Nike tick of 1967's Curved Interface, for some reason, pleased me less but I enjoyed the deep orange blobs of For a Situation and the architectural caprices that were Maquette for the 'Plastic Interchamber' (title!) and the swirling, curving Units of Habitation, presumably a tribute to Le Corbusier's Marseille tower block even if the designs seem to come more out of Frank Gehry's sketch pad than Le Corbusier's.
Curved Intersurface (1967)
For a Situation (1965)
Maquette for the 'Plastic Interchamber' (1966)
Scheggi also got involved in designing dresses which seems quite unusual for a man of that era (he was born about the same time as my dad who only last weekend refused to enter an exhibition of wartime wedding dresses) and for a man operating in the then somewhat macho world of modern art.
The dresses are nice too. Scheggi moved back to Milan in 1961 so, on that score, it's not such a surprise that he should get involved with the fashion set. He loved poetry and literature too and though it's claimed that linguistic elements were incorporated into his art you'll either need a sharper eye or a keener mind than I have to spot them.
Despite all the long worded guff that accompanies the exhibition, the quotes from Italian architects insisting they want to redesign everything from the spoon to the city, and the often bombastic praise heaped upon Paolo Scheggi by the curators you come away a touch underwhelmed. It's pleasant art but it is, for the most part, juvenilia. Scheggi's untimely death tragically ensured that both his work and his name will be consigned to the margins of history. La morte a tutto. La morte non e niente.
Curved Intersurface (1965)
Inter-ena-cube (1967)
Reflected Zones (1965)
Reflected Zones (1962)
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