Vincenzo Agnetti. Catalog 2015

Before Vincenzo Agnetti, only Laurence Sterne had dared to pass from the linearity of writing to draw diagrams with curved lines, angles and other graphical developments in chapter 40 of Book VI of his novel Tristram Shandy. For a couple of centuries this shocking licence that he had taken nevertheless went almost unnoticed or at most was accepted without arousing too many ifs or buts. However, it was then noted by Luciano Fabro, who grasped all its abnormality, so much so that he actually took out the page and transformed the graphical doodles into a work entitled C’est la vie (1986). But when Agnetti conceived and created his Tesi (Thesis, 1968-1972) and traced three drawings of broken segments, placing them between announcements of three entities of time, namely proportional time, integral time and derived time, in that gesture one has the clear sensation of being in the presence of an author able to combine every different logic of meaning with the freest associations of the imagination. […]
Bruno Corà, Vincenzo Agnetti: Statements that go beyond, in the catalog

[…] At the end of the 1950s, he approached informel painting and poetry, but, realising the limits of the image and word, he chose to devote himself exclusively to the germinal moment of the works, restricting his activity to dialogue with the members of the Milanese group Azimuth and writing theoretical texts in their journal. Increasingly convinced of the inadequacy of painting, in 1962 he abandoned any direct relationship with artistic operations and, after moving to Argentina, came to formulate the concept of ‘liquidationism’ or ‘arte no’: he totally rejected painting to replace it with the written word in countless little notebooks, never reread or reorganised, but left in the state of pure intuition, precisely as he had sketched them out. So he undertook a profound reflection on language. This led him to draw up Obsoleto (Obsolete) between 1963 and 1965, an ‘anti-novel’ in which he deconstructs the postulates of common sense to unmask the relativity of all linguistic conventions and at the same time recover what is lost, obliterated, missing. […]

[…] Agnetti continued to ceaselessly demonstrate how «one word is much like the other but they all tend towards ambiguity». Through paradoxes, contradictions and tautologies, in every one of his works he exposes the deceit intrinsic to language, technology and the modern tools of communication that always convey a power. He tries in all manner of ways to release language from the alienating use made of it by modern society. Therein, he goes beyond sense in search of a universally understandable language (numbers), so as to make the polysemy intrinsic to the word into unity, and to render the spectator an integral part of that process. […]
Ilaria Bernardi, Vincenzo Agnetti: «one word is much like another but they all tend towards ambiguity», text in the catalog