Esposizioni di niente/Testi per niente

With the Achrome series — paintings whose “white surface that is a white surface and nothing more, better still that just is: being” (Manzoni, 1960) — Piero Manzoni began his exploration of colorlessness, absence, zero, and nothing. With the eclipse of the work as a referent, these experiments verify the disappearance of the object, of the artefact that is shown and exhibited, with the signing of the ‘Manifesto Against Nothing’ on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Nothing (1960). The years of whiteness and nothingness in Manzoni's work were inspired by Beckett's skeletal prose in Waiting for Godot (1952). In its turn, Achrome was inspired by Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1955), which disperses linear narrative structure into a gaseous state. Beckett’s thirteen prose texts without plots and figures correspond to Manzoni’s thirteen paintings that exhibit nothing. The Texts for Nothing verify the tragic paroxysm that "there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" (Beckett 1949). The essay analyses the visual-textual short circuit between whiteness and nothing, between the void of the exhibition and that of writing, inhabited by Beckett and Manzoni in the silent dialogue between Achrome and Texts for Nothing.