Collezione, 1974

The series of six lithographs, each of them characterized by an individual title – Isfahan, Epidauro, Rebus, Monitor, Antologia, Collezione – present a heterogeneous "collection" of images. Independent from one another, the plates share the focus of the optical centre, as the vanishing and semantic point.
Isfahan is a photomontage in which the vanishing point of the image – a view of the courtyard of the Friday Mosque of Isfahan – is hidden by a reduced copy of the same image. By way of a mise en abîme the work foreshadows the central theme in the artist's output around the mid-1970s: the double, which leads the gaze to question not just itself but also the image and the representation as such.
Epidauro (Epidaurus) consists of the torn corners of a photograph of an exhibition space, arranged so as to generate an empty central area. That is to say, in the artist's own words, so as to indicate the "temporary limits of a virtual and changing space", comparable to that of a stage, as suggested by the title, which evokes the venue of an ancient Greek theatre.
Rebus proposes an aerial view of the Great Wall of China, divided horizontally by the word in French “horizon” (from a painting by René Magritte) and torn along the side opposite the horizontal median line. The paradox between the word "horizon" (which in a landscape view indicates the borderline between the sky and the earth or sea), as well as the aerial view and the tearing that simulates the profile of a mountain chain, is sealed by the title, which implies an enigmatic relationship between the words and the images, typical of the enigmatic game by the same name.
Monitor presents the face of a clock, on which the image of a magnetic tape is situated at the centre. The juxtaposition of the two objects animated by a rotatory dynamic – defined by the movement of the hands and by the running of the tape – generates a concentric tautology.
In Antologia (Anthology) the image of an "anthology" of colours on a blank sheet is covered in the area corresponding to the corners of the image by the torn corners of a second blank sheet; the remaining part of this second sheet is crumpled at the centre, as if to echo the informal combination of colours.
Collezione (Collection) is a grid of sixty-four square elements made up of the concentric and arbitrary overlapping of small photographic details of paintings by contemporary artists at the centre of other larger details. The individual images, deprived of their original identity, thus relive like pieces set in the regular pattern of the chessboard.
The original collages of the six plates are documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at numbers GPC-0287, GPC-0288, GPC-0285, GPC-0284, GPC-0286, GPC-0283.