The exhibition of the void at Galerie Iris Clert is now considered a turning point in art history. However, the presentation of the void was not exactly novel. The void was always a relevant subject in modern art, with pride of place in some works by the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko or Giorgio de Chirico placed the question of the interaction between materiality and immateriality at the centre of their art. There is, especially in Giorgio de Chirico’s oeuvre, a very particular analogy with Yves Klein’s works. In his pittura metafisica, the Italian painter anticipated the French artist’s spatial void. Yves Klein’s Le Vide was an installation, a deserted white room, an empty public space, an accessible and visitable place (absurdly filled on the opening night). Most pittura metafisica represents the attempt at translating the feeling of spatial voidness into painting by emphasising the reality of the void. The difference between Yves Klein and Giorgio de Chirico naturally lies in the fact that the empty city squares featured in pittura metafisica cannot be physically visited. However, the attempt to visualise the void remains a contradiction, or a perfidious provocation to our metaphysical abilities. Giorgio de Chirico was one of the first visual artists to dedicate a significant part of his oeuvre to the complex question of the reality of the void. His pittura metafisica was always an entirely captivating contradiction but it did gain a new, unforeseen fascination, especially in its latter stages.

Curiously, the lockdown brought with it an involuntary ability to once more reflect on the question of the reality of the void. For a few weeks, the emptiness of public spaces became an omnipresent phenomenon. The lockdown offered (albeit against explicit orders) the unique possibility of visiting some empty city squares of the same kind as those which can be seen in Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings. An invisible virus afforded us a few rare moments to acquaint ourselves with the extraordinary reality of empty squares. The empty city squares of pittura metafisica became a visitable reality in the spring of 2020. In other words, the pandemic spurred a new reflection on the empty city squares painted in the golden days of European modernism. But what is the fascination of an empty square?

On 26 January, 1910, Giorgio de Chirico was in Florence and wrote a letter to Fritz Gartz declaring himself as the only one to have truly understood the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and adding that his entire oeuvre was the proof of that.1 Fritz Gartz, a painter from expressionist realism, was a friend from Munich and a colleague of Giorgio de Chirico between 1906 and 1909 at Akademie der Bildenen Künste. During that time, the two friends had come across the works of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger at the city’s Neue Pinacothek; they would become a decisive influence on Giorgio de Chirico. Böcklin’s symbolism in particular left an unforgettable impression on him. However, even more important to his pittura metafisica were two other moments in 1909. In the autumn of that year, little after his arrival in Florence, Giorgio de Chirico spent a sun-drenched afternoon on a bench in Piazza Santa Croce, which was all but empty, looking at Dante’s monument. Although he had spent time at the emblematic square in the centre of Florence on other occasions, de Chirico had the ‘strange feeling’ that he was seeing ‘for the first time’. He understood that the reality of Piazza Santa Croce is an enigma. The two first works of his metaphysical art bear the titles L’Énigme de l’oracle [The Enigma of the Oracle] and L’Énigme d’un après-midi d’automne [The Enigma of an autumn afternoon], the latter a clear reference to the realisation of the ‘strange feeling’ of seeing the quasi-empty Piazza Santa Croce, with the Dante monument reappearing on the canvas like a Greek statue casting a long shadow across the sunny autumnal afternoon.

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