Vatican Museums

From the beginning of the Seventies, the painter Hans Hartung, one of the most central exponents of informal abstraction, undertook important research distinguished by the use of ever new procedures for transforming the gesture of forming the pictorial surface.
The canvas Rayonnement, chosen from a series of compositions exhibited in 1964 at the Gallerie de France in Paris, was produced by the artist by concealing colours previously applied to the canvas under layer of black paint. The gesture of scraping the surface allows the luminous underlying shades to emerge in intersecting lines, creating a shimmering effect similar to the traces left by lightning in a dark sky, an allusion rooted in the passion the artist manifested from his earliest youth for astronomy and in particular for the signs left by the movement of celestial bodies.