In the early 1960s, Schifano takes the Italian art scene by storm with his so-called Monocromi. These are a series of works with reduced color and form, created between 1960 and 1963, in which the artist initially uses only one color and later two.
Typical of the early Monocromi—such as the two untitled works on paper from 1960—is a mostly rich and dripping application of paint in the form of a rectangle with rounded corners. These are reminiscent of picture or slide frames or television screens. They act as visual filters, detaching the gaze from reality and guiding it through a kind of lens. Schifano repeatedly returns to this motif in the following decades and in other series of works.
The radical reduction of his visual language offers a fascinating alternative to the prevalent gestural abstraction of the time, which focuses on spontaneous and physical expression. Schifano describes himself as an attentive observer. He finds ideas for his art in everyday urban life, including street signs and billboards. Inspired by this, he integrates packing paper into his paintings by gluing it onto the canvas and painting over it with lacquer.
Schifano’s Monocromi can be divided into different types. Initially “empty,” their surfaces gradually fill with subtle fragments, signs, and symbols derived from the visual language of the big city. For example, the red-and-white striped Cartello Piccolo (1962) is inspired by warning signs on wooden construction site fences. The shapes in Tempo moderno (1962) are, in turn, based on the number “zero” in the typography of early digital machines.
The principle always remains the same: Familiar things are transferred into painting. Schifano explores and plays with the expressiveness of individual everyday signs. His use of packing paper as a substrate and his quick, dripping application of paint testify to his fascination with material textures and his casual approach to painting, which runs through his entire oeuvre.
