Painted during Vanni’s yearlong stay in New York in 1958, Strappo [Tear] distills the investigations of the preceding years into a single, taut composition. Gone are allusions to prismatic volume or architectural scaffolding. What remains is a surface suspended in contradiction: three chromatic fields,two red, one magenta, press against each other with no visual cues to distinguish foreground from background.
The result is a composition in which every reading cancels or undermines another. The magenta band may be expanding, or it may be collapsing between the two flanking reds. Depth is not described but implied through tension.
The pair of blue geometric structures near the lower edge draws the eye into an unexpected form of visual gravity. Connected by a narrow, high-strung axis, these sharp, crystalline forms seem to anchor the entire painting. Their precise alignment and exaggerated tension were inspired, in part, by Vanni’s observation of suspended bridges in New York where the middle point of the span absorbs and expresses the force of the entire structure. Similarly, here, the painting’s energy seems to accumulate in the line between the two forms, transforming a small element into the compositional fulcrum.
A fissure-like element at the lower edge of the canvas introduces a striking innovation: the suggestion that another painting might lie beneath, unseen but present. This motif, which recurs throughout Vanni’s later work, signals a conceptual shift. The surface is no longer an image but a membrane, vulnerable to stress, incisions, and transformation.
Strappo marks the first full articulation of themes that would become central to Vanni’s practice: the ambiguity of planes, the multiplicity of spatial readings, and the possibility that what we see may only be part of a layered whole. It is not a conclusion but a point of inflection.
Vanni’s exposure to the New York art scene in 1958, especially the works of Clyfford Still and Gorky, may have contributed to the work’s emphasis on graphic tension and internal contradiction, elements he absorbed and restructured on his own terms, avoiding the overt gesturalism of Action Painting.
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