(Homs, Libya 1934–1998 Rome)
“Boccioni 1”, signed, dated 1966 Schifano, on the reverse titled, signed, dated Schifano 66, no. 66/6, enamel paint, spray varnish on canvas and Plexiglas, 60 x 50 cm, framed, (PP)

Photo certificate:
Fondazione Mario Schifano, Rome, no. 66/6 (29.5.2011) (label on the reverse)
Archivio Mario Schifano, Monica Schifano, Rome, no. 02448130722 (26.7.2013)

Provenance:
Galleria Internazionale Due Mondi, Rome
Private Collection, Italy

Exhibited:
Travelling exhibition, Rome, Immagini degli Anni ‘60: Poesia e Verità, Galleria Internazionale Due Mondi, February 1966 (label on the reverse)/Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti/Parma, Galleria La Sanseverina/Prato, Palazzo Petronio;
Parma, Antologica, Salone delle Scuderie in Pilotta, February - March 1974, cat. no. 971 (with ill.)

Literature:
Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Mario Schifano, edit. La Nazionale, 1974, plate 177 with ill.

References to the history of art, both ancient and recent, multiply in Schifano’s works in 1964/65: “Matisse Brancusi sogno”, “A la Balla, When I remember Giacomo Balla and Villa Borghese”, “La testa della madre 1913”, “Volere Brancusi in giardino”, “Vittoria sul sole per Kasimir Malevic”, and the successful “Futurismo rivisitato” series, were all conceived during this period (...). The irruption of mass media modifies both the art of perception as well as the art of remembering: as a result, Futurism becomes ‘the Futurists’, more precisely, their photographic image as reproduced in books, magazines and newspapers. Not the work, but the person.

Boccioni and his friends are suspended on Schifano’s surfaces with an air of defiance at times bordering on the pathetic. They are wrapped in their 1910s overcoats, reduced to mere outlines without a face, identifiable only on the basis of their posture, thanks to a famous photograph rather than their oeuvre. Schifano looks at them with the nostalgia and yearning with which one would look at an old photo album, filled with images of relatives about whom one has only heard as a child and who have now changed, acquiring an almost mythical dimension through memory. In order to accentuate this feeling of distance and community at once, Schifano resorts to using perspex panels in his works.  This rigid, sterile, almost always colourful industrial material interposes itself between the work and the beholder (despite its being an integral part of the work), diffusing and confusing the outlines that change, depending on the point of view. This “atmospheric” device transfers a confused spatial perception into a temporal dimension where vision is impaired not as a result of a deliberately unclear space but, rather, of the time that has passed and hence separated both the artist and the beholder from the event and the experience they wish to rescue from oblivion and thus “revisit”.
M. Meneguzzo, Schifano, edit. Essegi, Pinacoteca Comunale di Ravenna, 1982)