Piero Manzoni, Libera dimensione
Andrea Mirabile
The essay analyzes Piero Manzoni’s Libera dimensione (published in 1960 in the second and last issue of the journal «Azimuth»). Manzoni argues that figurative painting is dead, critical commentaries of a work of art are useless, and verbal language in general is incapable of interpreting, translating, and even describing a visual experience. Nevertheless, Manzoni considered himself both a writer-theorist and a painter, befriended several poets, and was greatly interested in the cross-fertilizations between the verbal and the visual. Consequently, Libera dimensione is both a contradictory text and a revealing mirror of some fertile aporias of post-war Italian avantgarde art.