Painted during Vanni’s time at Yale under Josef Albers, this work, titled Muraglia cinese [China’s Wall], stands among the most rigorously abstract of his career. While the jagged silhouettes embedded in alternating bands of lavender, sand, yellow, and cyan may loosely evoke the outline of New York rooftops, any trace of figuration is swiftly subsumed into the painting’s formal architecture. The composition unfolds not through spatial illusion but through rhythm and modulation.
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Painted during Vanni’s time at Yale under Josef Albers, this work, titled Muraglia cinese [China’s Wall], stands among the most rigorously abstract of his career. While the jagged silhouettes embedded in alternating bands of lavender, sand, yellow, and cyan may loosely evoke the outline of New York rooftops, any trace of figuration is swiftly subsumed into the painting’s formal architecture. The composition unfolds not through spatial illusion but through rhythm and modulation.
Each chromatic layer responds to the one above and beneath it, generating a visual tempo that mirrors musical phrasing, a long-standing fascination for Vanni, and one given special resonance during this period, as he spent weekends in conversation with Maestro Arturo Toscanini at the conductor’s home in Riverdale, NY.
What distinguishes this canvas is its unwavering commitment to internal coherence. While Inverno still gestured toward a landscape memory, here the image rejects any external validation. Instead, meaning is generated entirely within the interplay of color and shape. The influence of Albers is evident in the orchestration of hue and value: each color shifts subtly in relation to its neighbor, demonstrating how visual perception is contingent, fluid, and relational. Lavender, placed against sand, flattens; set against cyan, it recedes. Yellow, so often dominant, is here softened by its adjacency to pale earth tones. These micro-adjustments activate the surface, drawing the eye not toward a fixed center, but across intervals of chromatic tension and release.
The title, Muraglia cinese, does not anchor the painting to a specific reference but suggests a mental association, a distant echo of layered fortifications, or a metaphor for rhythmic partition. And yet, beyond such hints, the sensibility remains unmistakably Vanni’s, tactile, luminous, and quietly interior. This painting does not argue for abstraction as an end in itself. Rather, it marks a moment when abstraction became, for Vanni, a mode of listening: to color, to silence, and to the internal harmonics of form.
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