Vincenzo Agnetti's Photo-Graffie and Later Works at Fondazione Brodbeck

Fondazione Brodbeck in Catania presents a solo exhibition of Vincenzo Agnetti (Milan, 1926–1981), focusing on his late series Photo-Graffie and works on paper from 1979–1981. The show reveals a mature, lyrical Agnetti where poetry becomes the substance of art. The Photo-Graffie series involves photographic film exposed to light, then scratched with a metal point to restore drawing and painterliness, creating ethereal landscapes and figures. Twenty works on paper combine photography, writing, ink, pastel, and collage, originating from a chance purchase of a Japanese album in Gibraltar. Agnetti re-photographed the hand-colored plates, adding citations, drawings, and even output from his 1968 'Macchina drogata'—a modified Olivetti calculator that replaced numbers with letters. The exhibition traces a non-linear, cyclical process of memory and amnesia, past and present. Agnetti's earlier career included electronic automation in Argentina, and from 1967 he collaborated with Manzoni and Castellani on the journal Azimuth.