VINCENZO AGNETTI
TESTIMONIANZA
TESTIMONIANZA
(ed. with B. Corà)
Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2015
Through an introductory essay by Brono Corà as well as a text by Ilaria Bernardi and her catalog entries and descriptions of the most exemplary works by Vincenzo Agnetti (Milan, 1926-1981), the book, edited by Bruno Corà and Ilaria Bernardi, aims to take us through the rich oeuvre of an artist who chose analytical rigour and restless poeticality as complementary watchwords, as he sought to replace the object with language, presence with absence, the progressive passing of time with forgetting, by heart.
After graduating from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and frequenting the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, at the end of the 1950s Vincenzo Agnetti approached Informel painting, and poetry, before working alongside the Milanese group Azimuth. Subsequently, he decided to refuse to paint, during a period he called “liquidationism” or “arte no.” In the second half of the 1960s, using various media (felt, bakelite, photography, printed texts, voice recordings and performances), Agnetti began to formulate apparently oxymoronic axioms analyzing the very act of making art, as a forerunner to international research that would follow shortly afterwards. From the second half of the 1970s to his premature death in 1981, these multiple interpretations prompted by apparently nonsensical associations would lead Agnetti to begin to analyse photography.