Schifano lives in a time when television is becoming the dominant mass medium. Initially a luxury item, it quickly becomes a commonplace device in the 1960s, bringing news and entertainment into private households.
For Schifano, television becomes a veritable obsession. He places numerous sets throughout his apartment and studio, which run day and night—mostly without sound, but continuously broadcasting images.
In this endless stream of transmitted images, the artist—who is experiencing a “crisis of painting” during this time and is even considering giving up painting altogether—finds a new, inexhaustible repertoire of visual stimuli. Inspired by this, he begins photographing television screens in 1969. He transfers these images onto canvas using photographic emulsion and then paints them with glazes of colored enamel. The result is hybrid works that lie somewhere between photography and painting.
With their rounded corners and dark frames, works such as Paesaggio TV (1970) and Inventario (1974) clearly reference tube televisions and thus the origin of the images themselves. Blue, yellow, or transparent acrylic glass hoods over the paintings reinforce the impression of a television screen. The painter is deeply fascinated by this new, mediated perception of the world.
Schifano repeatedly refers to television as his “auxiliary muse.” It becomes a window to the world, while the artist lives an increasingly reclusive life and hardly ever leaves his studio. Whether war documentaries, art programs, or trivial shows—his works reflect the entire spectrum of the television landscape at the time. Appropriately, he titles many of these works Paesaggio TV (Englisch: TV Landscape).
Even when Schifano returns to painting in the traditional sense in the 1980s and 1990s, he continues to excessively photograph television screens—often casually and crookedly without paying attention to precision. He has these photographs developed in the 35mm format and, as he had done with his canvases, intuitively adds splashes of color, markings, and overpainting to the prints.
For the 1993 Venice Biennale, where he occupies an entire hall, Schifano creates the large-format work Untitled (1993) from this material. This visual diary comprises several hundred overpainted photographs of television screens taken between 1983 and 1993. It condenses an entire decade of television into a polyphonic whole and seems astonishingly relevant in today’s age of digital image overload.
