(Turin 1871–1958 Rome) Linea di velocità + vortice, circa 1913, signed and dated FUTUR BALLA 1912, pencil, charcoal on paper, 14 x 20 cm, (PP)

Provenance: Giacomo Balla, Rome; Giovanni Prini Collection, Rome; Prini Estate, Genoa; Andrea Contini, Genoa (2000); European private collection Photo certificate: Elena Gigli, Rome, 22 July 2007, archive no.313 “Everything moves, everything runs, everything passes quickly. A figure is never stable in front of us: it is constantly appearing and disappearing. Because of the persistence of vision on the retina, things which are moving become misshapen, following on from each other like vabriations, in the space they are moving across”, wrote Balla as early as 1910 (in La pittura futurista). From 1913 onwards Giacomo Balla spent some time studying and analysing movement and how it breaks down: starting with the analysing of how a little girl runs on a balcony and how swifts fly about the eaves, then on to how cars move, until he came to the abstract notion of speed. Having experimented with „abstract speed“, Balla combined this analysis with other factors: space or rhythm, the landscape or the vortex. Nothing new; just elements which had first been studied on their own and now had interpenetrated with each other. If we examine these two elements: speed line is just a line which is streched and compressed like a spring which Balla derived from a comparison with a moving car and which interpenetrates in this work with the vortex. “The vortex came about as a complication of the speed line combined with a cosmic force. The succession of shooting orbits creates the shape of the vortex, which exists in nature and is visible only to the mental eye”. ´A vortex comes alive which is perfected on the next page, or is taken up again later in the context of radiating light or a floral whorl. Every page is like a frozen instant yet which is fated to continue in space and time´, Maurizio Fagiolo told me. (Elena Gigli, Rome 22 July 2007).