Achrome

Executed in 1958-59, Achrome presents a grid of rough squares which have been rendered in kaolin on canvas. There is no representation and indeed Manzoni has even selected a medium which avoids colour, creating the artistic equivalent of a tabula rasa. In contrast to the personal outpourings that characterised the art of many of Manzoni's contemporaries in Europe and the United States, here the artist has removed his personality, creating as much as possible a realm of infinite potential, a lowest common denominator that through its own non-specificity manages to become universal. This universality is accentuated by the genesis of the Achrome itself: Manzoni has used panels of canvas soaked in kaolin and has allowed them to set slowly, a process that resulted in their moving around and ultimately defining their own appearance. In this way, Achrome is a product more of the forces of nature and the forces of the work's constituent parts themselves than of the artist.

Discussing the power and intention behind the Achromes, the qualities that lend them their unique sense of objecthood, Manzoni explained that they provide:

'a surface completely white (integrally colourless and neutral) far beyond any pictorial phenomenon or any intervention extraneous to the value of the surface. A white that is not a polar landscape, not a material in evolution or a beautiful material, not a sensation or a symbol or anything else: just a white surface that is simply a white surface and nothing else (a colourless surface that is just a colourless surface). Better then that: a surface that simply is: to be (to be complete and become pure)' (Manzoni, quoted in G. Celant, Piero Manzoni, exh.cat., Milan & London, 1998, p. 27).