In 1949, Giuseppe Capogrossi gave up figurative painting entirely and settled on a single invented sign — a black, comb-like glyph with blunt, jagged teeth — that he would repeat, rotate, and rearrange across canvases for the rest of his career in a series he simply called “Surface” (Superficie). Instead of building a composition from many different shapes, he built one from a single shape’s rhythm: how many times it repeats, how it’s angled, how tightly it’s packed.
That’s what makes this piece such a clear case study in color blocking: every one of those black signs is a solid, unmodulated color block set against one flat contrasting ground — here, saturated yellow and cream. There’s no shading or blending anywhere in the painting; all of the visual energy comes from how densely or loosely the black shapes are packed together and which direction each one tilts. Look at how crowding the signs into a tight cluster in one area, while leaving open ground elsewhere, creates a sense of movement and weight — pattern and color blocking working as a single tool.
