La Parvilles 1915

Francesco Cangiullo made this drawing on a sheet of paper with what looks like black ink. It’s so simple, so reduced – a few marks like coded characters or a kind of personal shorthand, or a child’s drawing – but somehow suggestive. I can imagine Cangiullo, maybe on a train, just quickly jotting down these glyphs. A zig-zag supported by an angle, with what looks like a wisp of smoke on top, and then some other forms that look like letters. Maybe he was thinking about some other artist, or even an engineer designing something, and how forms can be reduced to their bare minimum, and how that can still carry meaning. I bet he was interested in visual languages and how we can use them. The beauty of painting, or drawing, is that it can be so direct, so immediate. It embraces ambiguity, and it’s in that openness that new ideas emerge. What do you think it means?