The echo of Kounellis’ show in Milan, Atto Unico (2006) at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation is still vivid in our memories…

Kounellis, having turned to a frequent use of large blotches in recent years, introduced a new degree and an ulterior operative acceleration in his work…

As for the “blotch” which appears on the exhibition poster lining the streets of Milan, it seems to have been produced by a glass of ink overturned on a sheet of paper. This could be interpreted as an “error;” an accident that “distances us from the truth or from the settled-upon norm,” in short something that could be thought of as a “mistake.” Among the synonyms of “blotch” in dictionaries, we also find the term “fault” [in terms of guilt]. So it would be natural for us to try to discover the reason for the “error” just as for the eventual “fault” among the elaborations to which Kounellis has been intensely devoted for many years.

…the event that seems most akin to the blotch is the significant for- mal and gestural precedent of his Untitled with the “hundred-kilo weight of coal”unloaded on the floor of his studio in 1967, which Kounellis promptly delimited by drawing a square perimeter around it in white paint. The gesture of unloading the coal onto the ground and its uncontrolled placement there shares many aspects with the overturning of black enamel paint, whose occupation of the ground and spreading is just as incontrollable as the tumbling of the coal. If that comparison seems likely, then the white line around the “hundred-kilo weight of coal” is, in the case of the “blotch,” substituted by the circle of chairs surrounding it in the show in Milan.

In both cases Kounellis delimited and drew a border, thereby lending order to the random nature of the fall of the materials, giving them a “shape.” In fact, in the “hundred-kilo weight of coal” as in the “blotch,” the ghost of the Informel School lives on. It was a linguistic identity under whose wings the young Kounellis grew up, but to which – as is common knowledge – he immediately turned his back…

The evident data is the sacrificial act with which Kounellis definitively breaks free from the informal painting and, above all, from the sense of space in which easel painting is the emblem. That daring and risky act, a true leap into the dark – which could have been interiorized as a possible “error” and certainly as a motive of “fault” for having – actually – assassinated the painting of the elective fathers who preceded him, from Boccioni to Fontana, to Burri and others, was achieved with full awareness and by burning all his bridges behind him.

Were it possible to write an equation, it would be composed as such: the “blotch” is to the “hundred-kilo weight of coal” as oily fluidity is to dry fragmentation.

Bruno Corà, Kounellis: Epic of a Hundred-Kilo Weight of Coal and a Blotch, in Kounellis, edizioni Il Ponte, Firenze