Campo Azzurro (1986), by Giorgio Griffa (b. 1936, Turin), is a composition painted with acrylic on raw linen canvas. It is typical of Griffa’s work, being displayed unstretched with the canvas nailed directly to the wall and folded for storage. Griffa maintains that this gives his paintings a sense of a permanent evolution while underlining their materiality. Always painted from left to right without ever reaching the very edge, Griffa’s paintings directly refer to language and reveal a dynamic vocabulary of abstract signs. Inspired during the 1980s by the painting of Henri Matisse (b. 1869, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, d. 1954, Nice), as well as by Roman frescoes such as those of Pompeii, Giorgio Griffa created works like Campo Azzurro (1986), celebrating painting as the construction of a reality in its own right, without representation or specific narrative. Since the end of the 1960s, Griffa has been working on questions that are fundamental to the tradition of painting, namely abstraction, the materiality of the painting and systems of signification.