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Lot 84
Vincenzo Agnetti (1926-1981)
Cometa
Closed11 February 2014
Price Realised
GBP 23,750
More Information
Specialist note
"Carta della macchina drogata" (The drugged machine paper) as we Italian collectors call it, even though it is really a photographic enlargement laid on emulsioned canvas. "Cometa" refers to a work by Agnetti executed with the "drugged machine", which was in fact an Olivetti calculator, on which the artist replaced the numbers with the letters of the alphabet. These works were the first to be exhibited in Italy by Agnetti, following a five-year absence travelling the world.
Elaborated from the negatives of different enlarged texts (produced, as I was saying, by the drugged machine), superimposed and developed together using the photographic reproduction process, the Comets show fragmentary and illegible texts, dissolved among the series of several canvases, and "subsequently subtracted one at a time in sequence, so as to gradually lose semantic substance, like comets that progressively lose part of their tail". To Agnetti himself, "they recall painting, perhaps...".
The Comets are extremely difficult to find, this one bears on the reverse a dedication in friendship to Salvatore Licitra, who was then his young assistant (and is now an artist himself). Something that makes it even more precious to anyone, like us, who is also searching in the works for traces of human interaction.
Elaborated from the negatives of different enlarged texts (produced, as I was saying, by the drugged machine), superimposed and developed together using the photographic reproduction process, the Comets show fragmentary and illegible texts, dissolved among the series of several canvases, and "subsequently subtracted one at a time in sequence, so as to gradually lose semantic substance, like comets that progressively lose part of their tail". To Agnetti himself, "they recall painting, perhaps...".
The Comets are extremely difficult to find, this one bears on the reverse a dedication in friendship to Salvatore Licitra, who was then his young assistant (and is now an artist himself). Something that makes it even more precious to anyone, like us, who is also searching in the works for traces of human interaction.