The Palm (Schifano)

The Palm (also known as Palm Springs or La Palma or Senza Titolo) is a 20th-century late Pop art iconic painted in enamel on canvas by Mario Schifano. It was painted about 1987, in Rome, Italy. Palm trees are Schifano's most iconic and significant subject, like Fontana's cuts.

 History 
In 1987 in Milano, Mario Schifano aroused the enthusiasm and emotion of the public for the "No title" art work that represent a palm.
The work aims to be a denunciation of environmental protection and an awareness of sustainability inspired by the principles of advertising.
The painting executed in the mid eighty, represents the typical figure of a palm tree, with the red, white and green colors of the Italian flag, enriched by pink which is one of the most precious colors of Schifano. Schifano with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein is considered the founder of pop art.

This work is registered in the Archivio Monica Schifano, Mario Schifano's wife, and the only authorized official archive by sentences of the Italian judiciary.

Artistic style 
After returning from the USA, he rediscovers the techniques of the past with brilliant enamel, and rediscovers the figuration of the past, landscape and geometry, but the enamel is less juicy, the landscape, as the titles say, is an "anemic" landscape, but wants to contrast any impressionist interpretationF. Dell’Arco, Figurazione nuovissima di Mario Schifano, in Leader, III, 1965

In Schifano's work we perceive the link between nature and technology, and the characterization of the materiality of color which gives the surface a highly elegant path and rhythm.

Mario Schifano was the most relevant exponent of the Italian art movement which, in the early 60s, anticipated the concepts of American Pop Art. Schifano starts from the zeroing of the image to move on to a new figuration, thus focusing once again on the very meaning of painting. “I want to paint while painting” Schifano said in those days. Starting from his first monochromes, by resetting the degree of the pictorial gesture, he will turn towards the addition of enlarged images. Schifano transforms the canvas into a screen where he projects the images that are selected from his own memory. He isolates them, frames them, dilates them, imprints them on that film which has now become the surface of the picture. “This idea that the canvas is nothing but a support, a sort of place of memory, guides Schifano throughout his future journey.

Schifano passes to new pictorial images where he finds the representation of nature. Especially the latter is introduced in his "anemic landscapes" of 1963, where memory, through allusive phrases, rapid gestures and details, becomes the voice of the representation of nature itself. This will then further evolve in the series Trees, Oxygen Oxygen, Oasis, and imagination above all in the depiction of the Palm, where it finds its most complete maturity and where the artist carries forward his idea of the painting and its function as a screen. It also alludes to the protection of the environment, in times when it was not lived like today, and it alludes to a human and cultural problem, representing the theme of escape, where to rediscover the soul.AA.VV. Schifano 1964-1970 Dal paesaggio alla TV The escape from this solitude of the tree as an individual without roots, the escape from a way of building one's present through a rigid series of values, Schifano, in these paintings where the dream evidently begins to appear, the moment of detachment from reality, where the continuum of perspective space […] tends to fracture, Schifano begins to analytically dissociate the image”,AA.VV. , Mario Schifano, Parma, 1974 it presents itself as a complete manifesto of his cultured art at a key moment.

 Exhibitions 
 1987, Schifano, Roma

 Related pages 
 Mario Schifano
 Roy Lichtenstein
 Andy Warhol

 Bibliography 
 F. Dell’Arco, Figurazione nuovissima di Mario Schifano, in Leader, III, 1965
 AA.VV. Schifano 1964-1970 Dal paesaggio alla TV
 AA.VV. , Mario Schifano, Parma, 1974

 References 

Category:20th-century paintings