Vatican Museums

Le Désir d’illumination belongs to the series of “whites”: six monochrome canvases that Achille Perilli produced, inspired by the apocryphal Gospels, in the hope of transferring to the signs of divine mystery to the pictorial surface. Founder in 1947 of “Forma 1”, present in 1952 at the first exhibition of the “Origin” group, it was precisely in 1958 that the Roman artist began to bring important variations to the techniques he used in his works: he treated the surface of the canvas with pumice stone chalk or marble powder and vinyl glue, thus giving rise to the first “graffiti”, compositions with an informal character and of notable graphic value, which he continued to produce until 1968. The work, which belongs to this phase of experimentation, remained in the artist’s collection until 2003, when it entered the Vatican collections.