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Artworks:

Giovanni Giacometti

Vasi, 1919
oil on canvas
65.5 x 55.0 cm
Well aware of the explorations of the French avant-garde with its penchant for pictorial expression through color, Giovanni Giacometti discovered Paul Cézanne’s work in 1907 at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and said he was amazed by the purity and simplicity of his painting. Later, in 1915, he wrote: “In Solothurn, the Cézannes still affect me just as much.” The formal experimentations of the painter from Aix inspired his own investigations of color, which served not only to express light, but also to construct reality by defining volumes and structuring objects in space.

Although Giacometti was still fond of representing nature, he gradually abandoned all perspectival illusions and strove to synthesize his pictorial language. The painting Vasi (Vases) is one of his few still lifes. It seems almost abstract at first glance, and only reveals its subject upon closer examination.

In this tightly framed composition created in 1919, the artist exemplarily succeeds in his pursuit of materiality through the modulation of color without recourse to the traditional means of shading and contours. Obeying an autonomous artistic logic, the reproduction of reality – in this case a few vases on a covered table – was exclusively based on establishing intense resonance between colors and working the thick pictorial material with a spatula, an expressive technique that tended towards corporeality.

Here Giacometti uses an ever-more-audacious pallet, made up of muted, essentially secondary colors in shades of orange, green and violet. A few spots of brighter color liven up the dark monochromaticity of the bluish unlighted areas, while skillfully distributed minimal light-colored strokes define illuminated highlights. With remarkable economy, Giovanni Giacometti succeeded in creating a highly atmospheric still life whose radiant darkness is reminiscent of the works of another great master he venerated: Rembrandt.

Giovanni Giacometti, Vasi, Vases, 1919