The exhibition brings together two artists who participated contemporaneously, and often side by side, in a period of incredible artistic innovation, breathing the same avant-garde air and creating works from it that are diverse but with clear common denominators. As Flaminio Gualdoni explains in the introduction to the catalogue, “The Manzonian achrome like the volumi that Dadamaino wants “waiting for something” – and in this “waiting” is all the love and support of Lucio Fontana – are a sort of resetting of the codified notion of the work. First of all, they are not rhetorically a “degree zero”: which renders their artworks, beyond biographic happenings, the main accomplices in a decisive rupture in art after the Second World War.” And it is exactly this aspect of resetting of traditional painting, in favour of a concept itself completely new art, that this shows wants to highlight. “A surface of limitless possibilities”, is how Piero Manzoni defines the canvas when introducing a solo exhibition of Dadamaino in 1961. The artworks of Dadamaino (Milan, 1935 – 2004) on display are: Volumi, artworks in which at the end of the fifties with a meditated but peremptory gesture the artist rips the canvas, overcoming in an instant the constraint of considering the canvas itself as the place of painting; Volumi a fori regolari, with which Dadamaino matches the tabula rasa of the rip with the rigorous and sequential order of circular geometry; Volumi a moduli sfasati, an ingenious representation of the infinite, achieved by die-cutting and mounting plastic shower curtains onto the frame; Rilievi on canvas and paper; oggetti ottico-cinetici and optical artworks, which the artist took, at the end of 1962, to the main international exhibitions adhering to the Nouvelle Tendence group. “I have always researched materials, forms, situations, everything that could be researched,” is how Dadamaino himself, in 1980, summarised the innovative spirit of his own ingenious work. From the work of Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 – 1963) the pieces on exhibition are some of the Achrome series (sewn canvases, wads and packages) which represent the degree zero of limited pictorial expression through exhibition of his basic materials; tavole di accertamento, merda d’artista and other artworks, including linee, which “express the concept of the infinite much more than any other kind of painting” – as Manzoni himself put it. Lucio Fontana’s words on this subject are significant, “The line of Manzoni, the end of art.”