Nine figures fill this large horizontal canvas, but their contours are under negotiation: each one is simultaneously a body and a tree, a shadow and an organism, a specific presence and the generalized energy of movement. The blue ground is vast and unequivocal; the figures rising from the dark root-zone at the base are anything but. In silver, red, and black they press upward into the blue, their internal structures carrying biomorphic marks that declare their double nature without resolving it.
Nine figures fill this large horizontal canvas, but their contours are under negotiation: each one is simultaneously a body and a tree, a shadow and an organism, a specific presence and the generalized energy of movement. The blue ground is vast and unequivocal; the figures rising from the dark root-zone at the base are anything but. In silver, red, and black they press upward into the blue, their internal structures carrying biomorphic marks that declare their double nature without resolving it.
The dark root-mass at the base is not background. It is the formal origin of everything above it: the figures emerge from it rather than standing on it, their lower portions continuous with the same dark organic material, their upper portions released into the blue. The base zone is geological time; the blue is mythological space; the figures are the meeting. Ovid's Metamorphoses, whose fundamental premise is that the boundary between body, plant, deity, and natural force is provisional, provided Vanni with a mythological framework that was also a formal one: these nymphs, shadows, and trees are the same thing at different moments in the same continuous becoming.
Vanni had encountered Matisse's treatment of dance in the late 1940s and recognized in it a compositional possibility he could carry forward: the dissolution of bodily contour into chromatic event, the figure becoming a color-and-line argument rather than a representation. The concentric ring-forms carried in the interior structure of each figure, his visual signature for inhabited intelligence, confirm that these are not decorative bodies but thinking ones, their dual nature declared precisely through the marks that refuse to let them be only one thing.
