Cappella del Barolo site features

You see it before you reach it. The chapel sits in open vineyard at Brunate, below the ridge that carries the village of La Morra, and in a landscape of green rows and pale farm buildings a block of saturated colour reads from a long way off.

It is small — the footprint of a shelter, because that is what it was built as. One room.

The exterior is Sol LeWitt's. The interior is David Tremlett's, repainted in its entirety. The two treatments are not the same, and the building is the better for the difference: you meet one scheme outside and a different one when you step through the door.

What both have in common is the vocabulary described in the record — chromatic play, and a multicoloured weave of curved and geometric lines. There is no iconography to decode. It is colour and line on a farm building.

There is no altar to visit, because there never was one in use. The building has been a shelter and then a work of art, and never a church.

The 1914 shelter

The thing under the paint. Built by peasants who worked the surrounding countryside and vineyards, to get out of a storm. Every later meaning this building has acquired sits on top of that purpose.

The name it was given, and the rite it never had

It was called the cappella di Santissima Madonna delle Grazie from the beginning, and never consecrated as a place of worship. A chapel in name only — which is why it could be handed to two artists.

Sol LeWitt's exterior

The face everyone photographs. LeWitt took the remaking of the outside in 1999.

David Tremlett's interior

Tremlett repainted the whole of the inside in the same year. Going in is the part of the visit people skip and should not: it is a different artist's scheme, not a continuation of the outside.

The colour itself

Since the work of 1999 the building has been characterised, inside and out, by various chromatic plays and a multicoloured weave of curved and geometric lines.

The vineyard around it

Brunate is a working vineyard site, and the chapel has no grounds of its own. The setting is the crop.