In Spazio a frammenti [Space in Fragments], Vanni pushes further into a personal grammar of abstraction, where field and fragment coexist in dynamic tension. Broad, opaque planes no longer serve as passive backgrounds but act as active agents in dialogue with intricate clusters of color. These jewel-like aggregations, part glyph, part architecture, do not construct volume but interrupt, perforate, or even peel back the surrounding plane, hinting at a hidden reality beneath the surface.
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In Spazio a frammenti [Space in Fragments], Vanni pushes further into a personal grammar of abstraction, where field and fragment coexist in dynamic tension. Broad, opaque planes no longer serve as passive backgrounds but act as active agents in dialogue with intricate clusters of color. These jewel-like aggregations, part glyph, part architecture, do not construct volume but interrupt, perforate, or even peel back the surrounding plane, hinting at a hidden reality beneath the surface.
The idea of the painting as a membrane begins to emerge: not a static surface, but a field of tensions where energy gathers at points of rupture. The composition’s central gray form, suspended alongside an aqua-blue ground, appears torn or eroded at the edges by lines and chromatic bursts that suggest pressure from within. The surrounding field becomes fully autonomous, articulated by luminous zones, from icy aquas to blazing cadmiums, that punctuate the edges like chromatic aftershocks.
A vertical filament of pixel-like fragments climbs and descends the canvas, creating a subtle axis of symmetry. These micro-structures recall earlier checkerboard motifs but are now used less as optical devices and more as pathways or connective tissue between surface and void. The spatiality is no longer architectural but tectonic; ruptured, drifting, non-hierarchical. Color is deployed not to suggest volume, but to animate the relationship between flatness and density. The result is a visual field of sustained tension, where form is constantly being articulated and unmade.
With Spazio a frammenti, Vanni deepens the evolving language he had been shaping over the preceding years. While echoes of Klee and Kandinsky remain perceptible in the charged relationship between line and field, and Albers’ influence persists in the sensitive modulation of color, the painting marks a further step away from structured abstraction toward something more fluid and autonomous: a space governed by its own internal logic, echoing Klee’s compositional philosophy and his vision of painting as a parallel world with its own laws.
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