Flora, 1985

With the sky at sunset in the background, an imaginary construction rises up constituted by the gradual overlapping of columns or colonnades, proportionally tapering upwards. At the base of this tower is the cut-out reproduction of the lower half of the body of the Farnese Flora – her feet protruding beyond the edge of the image suggest its positioning in the foreground – before the shaft of a fluted column. The upper part of the body, which is reduced in size, is instead half-hidden behind a colonnade, thus suggesting a more distant position.
The disassembled figure remains incongruous, separated by distinct optical levels, while the motif of the column, gradually multiplied, generates an architectural space that remains fragmentary, however: the temple at the top is incomplete, the vanishing point of the dizzying perspective remains blank. Against the backdrop of a golden sky, evoking an ideal dimension, the architectural montage suspended in the void underlies the very process of the construction of an image, in the precarious space of the imagination.
Like in other prints made in the 1980s by the same patron – a Piedmontese association in the constructions sector – the iconography draws inspiration from the architectural context.
The original collage on which the print is based is documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at number GPC-1679.