With Paesaggio graffito [Sgraffito Landscape], Vanni opens a transitional chapter in his painting, where the weight of color gives way to the tensile energy of line. The prismatic volumes of earlier works are still present, but they are no longer shaped by modulation or internal hue. Instead, they are dematerialized, reduced to wiry outlines etched into a black ground, evoking not mass but boundary. This white-on-dark sgraffito line, at once delicate and assertive, suggests a drawing where line becomes a vector of energy rather than a boundary of form.
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With Paesaggio graffito [Sgraffito Landscape], Vanni opens a transitional chapter in his painting, where the weight of color gives way to the tensile energy of line. The prismatic volumes of earlier works are still present, but they are no longer shaped by modulation or internal hue. Instead, they are dematerialized, reduced to wiry outlines etched into a black ground, evoking not mass but boundary. This white-on-dark sgraffito line, at once delicate and assertive, suggests a drawing where line becomes a vector of energy rather than a boundary of form.
This new graphic idiom places Vanni in quiet conversation with Paul Klee, particularly the dark-ground works such as Fish Magic, where incised lines animate the space between figuration and abstraction. The luminous violets and deep greens emerging from the black recall not only Klee’s magic landscapes but also the radiance of Odilon Redon’s pastels, where color seems to glow from within rather than reflect external light. Yet Vanni’s method retains a geometric discipline rooted in his earlier studies with Josef Albers, balancing the improvisational feel of graphic gesture with structural clarity.
Amid the angular lattice of white lines, shards of green, blue, and violet still pulse within the central facets, offering a chromatic counterpoint to the skeletal geometry. These colored fields float like inner membranes or ghost volumes, half-submerged in the dark. In Paesaggio graffito, drawing becomes architecture, and the picture plane becomes a site of tension between erosion and construction.
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