Costruzione in bilico [Construction in the Balance], 1957
Oil on Canvas
12.6 x 39.4 in 32 x 100 cm
Private Collection, Paris, France
In Costruzione in bilico [Construction in the Balance], Vanni extends the spatial inquiries he had begun to reformulate in Discendendo verso il fiume, pushing his vocabulary of crystalline segmentation into more precarious terrain. The painting’s title points to a state of suspended equilibrium. Across a panoramic canvas, sharp-angled forms lean, jut, and counterbalance in an unstable network of structural diagonals. Rather than occupying the picture plane in even rhythms, they cluster toward the edges, as if nudged by invisible pressures. ...more
In Costruzione in bilico [Construction in the Balance], Vanni extends the spatial inquiries he had begun to reformulate in Discendendo verso il fiume, pushing his vocabulary of crystalline segmentation into more precarious terrain. The painting’s title points to a state of suspended equilibrium. Across a panoramic canvas, sharp-angled forms lean, jut, and counterbalance in an unstable network of structural diagonals. Rather than occupying the picture plane in even rhythms, they cluster toward the edges, as if nudged by invisible pressures.
The once-faceted fields of Vanni’s earlier prismatic landscapes are now stretched and sheared, their volumetric integrity challenged by a graphic logic of strain and resistance. Pale lavenders and slate blues form the atmospheric field, while acidic greens, blacks, and checkerboard motifs inject tension. These chromatic accents behave like structural reinforcements, stabilizing otherwise teetering shapes.
While Vanni borrows the visual language of Op Art, he redirects it from kinetic illusion to spatial fragility. Optical devices are not ends in themselves but are used to suggest flexing, tilting, and balancing forces within an abstract field. There are echoes of Paul Klee’s lyrical fragmentation and Kandinsky’s early architectural dynamism, but Vanni resists their metaphysical tone. His forms feel physical, contingent, and unresolved. Color functions as tension, tightening or releasing across zones of form. Costruzione in bilico becomes a meditation on geometry at the edge of collapse, held together by invisible forces of will and perception.
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