Abat-jour (giochi proibiti), 1986

A large upside down canvas, surmounted by a top hat, teeters atop a globe placed at the centre of a chessboard that is the same size as the canvas, arranged on the ground by means of sixty-four square units held down by four plexiglas sheets placed close together. The white units consist of blank pieces of card stock, while the black ones stem from the photographs of an astronomical chart, which is rotated to a different position each time.1
If the celestial map – used here for the first time – represents the utmost visual aperture possible, the globe is a simulacrum of the world intended as an ensemble of every possible subject, while the chessboard is the pre-eminent place of conjecture. By way of the blank canvas that touches Everything, shielding the outcome of the contact in the manner of an abat-jour (as indicated in the title), the work stages the game of the representation itself, that is, the artist's desire to make a fulfilled vision his own. A risky “game”, actually, a “forbidden” one, as suggested by the overturned canvas and above all the upside down hat, which alludes to the author-actor who has fallen to the ground (in the furrow of the theme that hinges on the tension between the sky and the Earth, which the artist first began to study in La caduta di Icaro, 1981, GPO-0464).
The same theme was formulated in a second variant, made in 1988 (GPO-0614).

1 On the occasion of the first presentation of the work in Middelburg in 1987, in a single large room with a checkered floor that had inspired the idea, the photographs were directly alternated with white tiles.