Order and Construction: Geometries of the Real in Twentieth Century Art

In the early postwar period, Giorgio Morandi’s Paesaggio (c. 1925) offers a particularly meaningful key to understanding how geometry takes on a value that is both formal and ethical: it is not simply a visual language, but a response to the need to reconstruct perceptual continuity in a world marked by disintegration. 

On the canvas, space is organized through a series of essential elements: buildings reduced to compact volumes, surfaces devoid of detail, roofs synthesized into inclined planes. At the center of the composition stands a chimney, a vertical element that introduces into the landscape the sign of industrial modernity. 

The entire composition is built on a carefully calibrated balance: the chimney establishes a clear vertical axis that contrasts with the pervasive horizontality of the planes and the horizon line, while the architectural volumes are arranged in a progressive sequence that guides the viewer’s gaze into depth. Even the natural elements -the trees - do not disrupt this order but condense into compact masses, fully integrated into the overall structure of the image. 

What Morandi constructs is not a natural landscape, but a landscape recomposed through measure. Reality is reduced, filtered, and organized according to essential relationships. The presence of the industrial element is absorbed into the compositional balance, becoming a pure form among others. 

In this sense, geometry operates as a silent yet decisive principle: it does not impose itself as an explicit construction, but acts from within, stabilizing perception. It is precisely this dimension - both concrete and mental - that makes Morandi’s painting one of the most profound premises of postwar visual culture. 

This tension between order and complexity finds a further development in the work of A.R. Penck. 

If Basilico makes the geometric structure of space visible, Penck transfers its principles onto the level of language. 

In his work West 80 (1980), elementary forms - volumes, signs, points - are arranged on a surface devoid of perspectival depth, giving rise to a composition built through essential relationships. Space is no longer organized in terms of distance or architectural articulation, but as a field of interactions between minimal units. 

In this context, Penck develops a new and synthetic visual language in which geometry does not derive from the observation of reality, but from the construction of a symbolic system, inspired by primary codes, diagrams, and archaic forms, through which the complexity of reality is translated into structure. 

What matters is not resemblance to the world, but the possibility of constructing a readable system, based on internal rules and shared relationships. Geometry thus assumes a new function: no longer a tool of representation or analysis, but a code capable of condensing reality into essential and immediately recognizable configurations. 

This condition of autonomy is further developed in the work of Gerold Tagwerker, where geometry takes on an explicitly systemic dimension. In nightpiece#15 (2001), the surface is organized through grids and repeated modules, according to a logic of iteration that replaces any traditional compositional hierarchy. The image is no longer constructed through the balance between parts, but through the accumulation and reiteration of minimal units, generating a potentially infinite structure. 

Here, the grid becomes the generative principle of the work: not merely a visual device, but an operational model. Repetition does not produce static uniformity but introduces minimal variations that activate a subtle perceptual instability, suggesting a reality grounded in processes, sequences, and continuous redefinition. Geometry no longer represents the world nor translates it into a code; it directly assumes its mode of functioning.