Achrome

'The work of art has its origin in an unconscious impulse that springs from a collective substrata of universal values common to all men, from which all men draw their gestures, and from which the artist derives the 'archai' of organic existence. Every man of his own accord extracts the human element from this base, without realising it, and in an elementary and immediate way. Where the artist is concerned it is a question of the conscious immersion in himself through which, once he has got beyond the individual and contingent level, he can probe deep down to reach the living germ of total humanity. Everything that is humanly communicable is derived from this, and it is through the discovery of the psychic substrata that all men have in common that the relationship of author-work-spectator is made possible. In this way the work of art has the totemic value of living myth, without symbolic or descriptive dispersion: it is a primary and direct expression.
'The foundations of the universal value of art are given to us now by psychology. This is the common base that enables art to sink its roots to the origins before man and to discover the primary myths of humanity.
'The artist must confront these myths and reduce them, by means of amorphous and confused materials, to clear images.
'Abstractions and references must be totally avoided. In our freedom of 555ention 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 on to 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 as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for what they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are: to be' (P. Manzoni, 'For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', undated but presumably 1957, reproduced in Piero Manzoni: Paintings, reliefs & objects, exh.cat., London, 1974, pp.16-17).