A temporary exhibition devoted to a giant of Italian and European art, in a space housing a collection of 200 works, from the early twentieth century to the present day. Entering feels like stepping into an underground bunker where, amid grey walls and spacious galleries, surprises abound.

A persistent categorisation has shaped the critical reception of Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, 1936 – Rome, 2017) for decades: that he abandoned painting to become an alchemist of space, a sculptor of matter, a demiurgic master of Arte Povera. The exhibition “Jannis Kounellis: I Am a Painter” (on view until January 17, 2027), curated, as mentioned, by Vincenzo de Bellis in collaboration with the Archivio Kounellis in Rome, systematically and radically challenges this art-historical interpretation. The exhibition approaches painting not as a mere technical medium or a fleeting phase of his youth, but as the only true, coherent interpretative key to the Greek artist’s entire career.

The entire curatorial framework radiates from the seemingly unequivocal statement the artist loved to repeat: “I am a painter.” De Bellis explains: “The Greek term zogràphos, meaning painter as ‘one who writes life’, guided the entire curatorial project. Kounellis painted on canvas in the conventional sense for only a few years of his artistic career, but he then spent the rest of his life painting with iron, coal, fire, jute sacks and the aroma of coffee. He painted with space, with silence, with the memory of a Mediterranean civilisation he felt was under threat. Yet no exhibition had previously adopted painting as the primary lens through which to interpret his work.”

This exhibition brings together over 35 works created between the late 1950s and 2014, juxtaposing historic masterpieces with significant works never previously exhibited and rarities such as Untitled (Homage to Van Gogh) from 1991 and the black Rose on paper with a silver spray-painted background from 1966. It deliberately dispenses with a strict chronological sequence. “The route is circular, because Kounellis himself kept returning to the same themes throughout his life.”

Through this approach, which we might describe as fluid, Kounellis’s work reveals itself as an intense dialogue across time with the great tradition of art history: from Malevich to Van Gogh, from Mondrian to Ensor and Arp.

The opening of the exhibition brings the origins of the artist’s visual vocabulary into focus: a dizzying black square drawn directly onto the wall creates a charged interplay with the enamel works of 1958, in which the letters of a street sign (“Tabacchi”, meaning “Tobacconist”) bring together Malevich’s Suprematist avant-garde and the lived experience of the Roman street. “He always felt Italian: he adored Rome, his adopted home. Of course, he was born in Greece, but he rarely spoke his mother tongue,” his son Damiano tells us.

Painting takes on a graphic character in the four variations from the Roses series on display, among which the black version against a silver spray-painted background from 1966 stands out.

Kounellis’s painterly gesture manifests itself in the physical substance of things: iron, lead, tar, white wool, smoke and coal occupy the space, retaining their full tragic and earthly force. In a work from 2005, the prickly vitality of a field of cacti confronts the rigid boundary formed by rolls of lead, while in large compositions on canvas from 1967 and 1969, jute sacks become sculptural modules, rhythmic divisions of an imagined Renaissance polyptych in which the actual weight of reality is superimposed on the white surface of the painting.

The relationship with memory and absence reaches one of its most moving high points along the twelve-metre corridor dominated by Untitled (Homage to Van Gogh) (1991). In this monumental and rarely exhibited work, iron plates meticulously reproduce the exact dimensions of the Dutch master’s canvases: a warm, intimate light filters through slits in the metal, evoking the gold and the divine presence embodied in Byzantine icons. There is no figurative trace of the Dutch painter, only proportion, dimensions and an echo of his yellow. Pure poetry, in our view.

This same yellow, together with the archetypal image of the boat—a symbol of exodus, travel and movement across the Mediterranean—resurfaces in the works from 1978 and 2014. Migration, a tragedy of the twentieth century and a defining feature of Kounellis’s own life, emerges again in the work from 2007 displayed in the final section, perhaps the most theatrical: a folded coat, a hat and shoes on a chair suspended in front of the canvas, a fully fledged self-portrait staged as theatre.

Then there is a series of black coats hung at regular intervals on two walls of the gallery. Danna Olgiati tells us: “My husband Giancarlo managed to see this exhibition installed before he died: he stood before this room in silence for a long time. Then he asked me whether I could see what he saw. ‘What?’ I asked him. ‘Those hanging coats are Gogol’s Dead Souls,’ he told me.” It’s all there.