Refuse Refuse is one of Kitterle’s most restrained works: a near-monochrome fresco surface in which pale beige gives way to warmer earth tones below, with faint linear traces, scratches, and marks emerging from the ground rather than drawn explicitly onto it. Two figures, barely resolved, occupy the lower half of the composition in a posture that reads as resting, weighted, or spent. The palette refuses spectacle. The title does the same, turning the word “refuse” on its axis: waste, and refusal.
Refuse Refuse is one of Kitterle’s most restrained works: a near-monochrome fresco surface in which pale beige gives way to warmer earth tones below, with faint linear traces, scratches, and marks emerging from the ground rather than drawn explicitly onto it. Two figures, barely resolved, occupy the lower half of the composition in a posture that reads as resting, weighted, or spent. The palette refuses spectacle. The title does the same, turning the word “refuse” on its axis: waste, and refusal.
The fresco surface here is doing what Kitterle describes as its fundamental work: the material irregularities of the plaster, the variations in absorption, and the marks left by sanding and application become the primary language of the image. The figures do not inhabit a space so much as they are embedded in one, indistinguishable from the ground that generates them. This is the trace logic the work operates on: what remains after removal holds its shape in what surrounds it.
Giovanni di Paolo, the fifteenth-century Sienese painter Kitterle counts among his formative influences, produced figures of comparable spare, almost spectral presence: saints and suppliants rendered with the minimum of marks necessary to establish a body, the form inseparable from the ground in which it appears. The comparison is structural rather than stylistic: in both, the body is a zone of slight material difference rather than a fully modeled form, and the ambiguity between figure and ground is where meaning lives. Giuseppe Penone’s Arte Povera practice follows an analogous logic from the opposite direction: in works such as Patate (1977), a material receives an impression during its own process of transformation and carries it permanently, the form held in what surrounded it. Refuse Refuse occupies the same territory: figure as residue, presence as the shape left by what barely remained.
