Senza titolo, 1976

The vertical element in the foreground, consisting of the image of a brick chimney (after a metaphysical painting by Giorgio de Chirico) juxtaposed on a photographic reproduction of the shaft of a Doric column, stands out isolated against a complex architectural drawing, taken from a seventeenth-century handbook on perspective.
The imposing column recalls the vertical elements of the ancient drawing – a sort of portico either in ruin or being built – but at the same time it opposes the depth of the perspective and conceals the vanishing point. The ambiguous dialogue between the marked verticality of the column and the dizzying spatiality of the perspective emphasize the artifice implicit in both the spatial construction – the marvellous optical illusion of a two-dimensional drawing – and the outlandish montage of the classical shaft and the Dechirichian chimney. The intricate combination of perspectives, points of view, and illusory correspondences suspends any spatiotemporal rationale in favour of the very process of the construction of an image via the artifices of representation.
The print was commissioned from the artist by Ugo Ferranti for a client active in the construction sector: hence the emphasis on elements related to architecture and construction. The motif of the column is the principal element in various works produced in 1975-76 (cf. among the large-scale works GPO-0309, GPO-0323, and among the works on paper GPC-0369, GPC-0381, GPC-0427). The seventeenth-century architectural view, used here for the first time, especially reappears from 2008 onwards in some works on paper, as well as in the prints L’offerta musicale (GPE-0118) and Finis terrae (GPE-0160).