“Abstractions and references must be totally avoided. In our freedom of invention we must succeed in constructing a world that can be measured only in its own terms. We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental scenography. It is the area of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images. Images which are absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be.”

Source: For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Piero Manzoni, 1957, pp. 18-19

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Piero Manzoni 16
Italian artist 1933–1963

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