(Turin 1871–1958 Rome)
Motivo con la parola FAZZOLETTI, c. 1916, signed FUTUR BALLA, titled on the reverse Motivo con la parola FAZZOLETTI and with the artist’s stamp “pugno di Boccioni”. Collage of coloured and silver paper on cardboard, 21.5 x 31.5 cm, framed

Photo certificate:
Archivio Elena Gigli, Rome, no. 786, 2018

Provenance:
Atelier Balla, Rome (label with no. 631 of the family note book on the reverse)
Collection Mrs. F. Barnes, Castelgandolfo (Rome), until 1967
Brearte Auction House, Milan (stamp on the reverse)
Private Collection, Italy

During the First World War, Giacomo Balla experimented with a new technique: collage, which leant itself to creating abstract pictures with decisive à plat forms, just like those we can find in the painting of that period. Collage had often been used by the Futurists in Milan (Boccioni, Carrà) and Paris (Severini), but almost always with the aim of competing with Cubism’s papiers collés.
Balla proposed an innovative approach of inserting coloured paper as an extension of the pictorial discourse, akin only to certain experiments by Russian artists such as Olga Rozanova (who was exhibited at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome in 1914).

For Balla, the use of these brightly coloured papers is not merely “aesthetic”; here, the medium becomes the message: the word FAZZOLETTI [handkerchiefs]. The volumes of the letters which make up the word intersect with several silver-covered papers which, depending on the movement of the viewer’s eye, give a different luminosity and dynamism to the composition. Giovanni Lista writes that, “…the technique of collage for Balla represents the expressive space which is technically best suited to experimenting with the expressive and decorative potential of a synthesising reduction and geometrical simplification of shape”.