NOIRE

“Culture is learning to forget, just like what happens when we eat. However well prepared, we soon forget the flavour of food, allowing the energy we derive from it to take over. In a certain sense we forget the flavours, poisonings and pleasures of eating by heart, moving our legs, our arms, our heads forward more freely.”The concept of forgetting by heart represents and unites the first phase of Agnetti’s life and career. Although we can no longer see or hear him, we can appreciate this aspect of his art and life. For example all his most important emotional and work-related experiences have been forgotten by heart, but emerge as the artistic results of a hidden process.The period he spent with just a handful of friends, including Castellani and Manzoni, with whom he shared ideals, plans and artistic aspirations, dates to the late 1950s and early 1960s. His private life was also permeated by this intellectual fervour, which was complete and structured, but had yet to show itself. “There is just one obligation: logic. Logic commits suicide through coherence.”Within this elaborately constructed conceit, Agnetti drew a cosmology made of absences, of things forgotten, of voids. The pages of Il libro dimenticato a memoria are emptied, having lost the space usually occupied by the words. What is left is the carcass, symbolizing an incompatibility between object and language, reminding everyone that “culture is learning to forget.”

@Archivio Agnetti