(Florence 1940–1971 Rome)
Zone riflesse, 1964, signed and dated paolo scheggi/1964 on the reverse (barely legible), blue acrylic on three superimposed canvases, 100.5 x 100 x 7 cm

Provenance:
Galleria Fumagalli, Bergamo
VAF Stiftung Collection, Frankfurt am Main, no. 643
MART, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di trento e Rovereto

Exhibited:
Rovereto, Un secolo di arte italiana. Lo sguardo del collezionista. Opere della Fondazione VAF/Ein Jahrhundert Italienischer Kunst. Der Blick des Sammlers. Werke der VAF-Stiftung, Mart, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2 July -20 November 2005, exh. cat. Skira, Milan 2005, p. 196 with ill.
Karlsruhe, ZKM, zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie. Materialbild. Material picture. Immagine materiale. Italia 1950 – 1965 (Rom Offene Malerei. Das Materialbild im Italien der 1950er und 1960er Jahre), 1 April - 24 August 2008, exh. cat., Silvana editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2009, p. 205, 291 with ill.
Rovereto, La magnifica ossessione, MART Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 26 October 2012 – 16 November 2014, exh. cat. p. 138 with ill.
Rovereto, #collezionemart. canone contemporaneo, Mart, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 28 March- 8 November 2015
Karlsruhe, Art in Europe 1945–1968. The Continent that the EU does not know, ZKM Museum of contemporary art Atria 1+2, 22 October 2016 – 29 January 2017, exh. cat. p. 58 with ill.

Literature:
L. M. Barbero, G. Dorfles, La breve e intensa stagione di Paolo Scheggi, catalogue of the exhibition held at Galleria d‘Arte Niccoli, Parma, 23 November 2002 – 22 February 2003, n. PS044, p. 156 with ill.
K. Wolbert, Idiome der Materialsprache in der Italienischen Kunst / Idiomi del linguaggio materico nell’arte italiana / Idioms of Material Language in Italian Art, in P. Weibel (ed.), Material picture. Immagine materiale. Italia 1950 – 1965 (Rom Offene Malerei. Das Materialbild im Italien der 1950er und 1960er Jahre), Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo, 2009, pp. 110, 141, 171
D. Ferrari (ed.), VAF Stiftung, La Collezione/The Collection/Die Sammlung. Catalogo generale/General catalogue/Bestandkatalog, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo, 2012, p. 681 with ill.
Mart annual report, 2012, p. 98 with ill.
London, Snow Variation. John Armleder, Alighiero Boetti, Dan Colen, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Sol Lewitt, Piero Manzoni, Paolo Scheggi, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, 17 December 2013 – 1 February 2014, exh. cat. ill. 41, pp. 53, 179 with ill.
Paolo Scheggi. The Humanistic Measurement of Space, catalogue of the exhibition held at Robilant+Voena Gallery, London, 1 October – 4 November 2014, no. 41, pp. 53, 179 with ill.
D. Ferrari, Oltre il confine della tela. Fontana Burri Manzoni Dadamaino Bonalumi Scheggi, catalogue of the exhibition held at MAG. Museo Alto Garda, Riva del Garda in 18 July-1 November 2015, La Grafica, Mori, 2015, no. 45, pp. 99, 139 with ill.
L. M. Barbero, Paolo Scheggi, Catalogue Raisonné, Skira (Blue), Geneva - Milan 2016, p. 245, no. 64 T 35 with ill.

His training took place on the Florentine scene, in the small studio in his family home of Settignano where his first works came to life.
The change came at the beginning of the sixties with his move to Milan, which was one of the most lively and passionate cultural centres of the era thanks to the presence of artists such as Bruno Munari, Piero Manzoni, and Lucio Fontana, whose work definitively plunged the traditional concept of art into crisis. The latter, in particular, would become the point of reference for a whole generation: his way of tackling the surface, accommodating space through surface lacerations, going beyond the boundaries of painting and sculpture, aiming for a reset of art history based on illusion and fiction; all this pushed Scheggi onto the path of object-based art, its spatial-temporal dilation, onto the path of optical ambiguity, and monochrome, which would become characteristic of the whole of Scheggi’s oeuvre.
On the occasion of Scheggi’s solo exhibition at Il Cancello gallery in 1962, Fontana wrote:

“... I like the anxiety of your researches, your paintings, which are so deeply black, red, white and reveal your thoughts as well as your fears.
I cannot but wish you a ‘happy’ career and remind you to be humble, very humble, for we are ‘nothing’ in time.”

Scheggi’s monochrome works, which are characterised by three superimposed canvases with openings of various shapes and forms, cause viewers to lose themselves in the sequence of holes that multiply through the layers, absorbing the beholder into a spatio-temporal dimension that merges object, subject, and the environment into a unity.

“The working medium which Scheggi uses in his studies is made up of three overlapping surfaces. Three overlapping canvases with organised forms organise space. Scheggi’s space is an experimental dimension in which geometry, modulated in different structures, modifies and regenerates itself. The interpretation of voids is characteristic of this work. They are the empty parts that impose themselves on the surface, because they themselves are the result of the action, the repeated gesture of the artist who cuts the canvas by means of a die and according to an established plan. It is an uninterrupted search for new schemes, element after element, where curved lines and straight lines, circles and squares interact without merging. These objects truly represent a plan that is not only structural but more broadly ethical. The incessant dialectical proposition whereby interference determines intermittence constitutes the dominant factor in this investigation, its continuous development aimed at ever increasing our powers of perception.”
(G. M. Accame, from the catalogue of the exhibition “Alviani, Bonalumi, Castellani, Scheggi” held at La Nuova Loggia gallery, Bologna, 1967)

In this magnificent canvas of bright, deep blue, we find the concentrated efforts and investigations of an artist who dedicated his life to the very brief but substantial research into an internal force which animates the surfaces and brings colour to life. The aim of the artist’s incessant research is to construct a work through which to gain insight into the world, as its cognitive – rather than merely illustrative – correlative.

“I believe, as I have since the beginning, that one should not pose the question of what Scheggi might have been able to achieve had he lived longer. I truly believe that his brief period of productivity gave rise to a group of works which, even in their initial attempts, revealed an exceptional level of maturity, just as the final ‘actions’ and the final performances were indicating a new path which would have become imperative in the immediate future, and whose emergence Paolo’s sensitivity picked up on.”
Gillo Dorfles, Milan, September 2008