Tout ce qu’il y a de beau en Italie, 1986

Twelve framed elements placed at short intervals to form a large painting reproduce an engraving portraying a draughtsman in a landscape with ruins.1 The artist turned the nineteenth-century image into the image of a face seen from the side, adding an eye2 and hiding the upper part with a strip of black paper to emphasize the shape of the hypothetical head. Each of the twelve elements is made up of a collage consisting of: 1) a detail of the draughtsman of ruins, each time rotated and included in a spiral path that converges in the cavern-ear, 2) a small circular fragment of a colour reproduction of the solar system, 3) one or two torn fragments of the answer given to the artist by nine friends, when asked to express a suggestion as concerns "all that is beautiful in Italy".3 The element with the eye also bears a tiny metal globe in the area of the pupil, applied to the glass. At the top, the black paper background is studded with celestial bodies represented by small elements of white and silver paper.
The complex image finds its keystone in the number nine, intended as a sign of the absolute. The spokesperson for the nine figures who were consulted, the author-draughtsman repeated nine times in the landscape of ruins renews without stopping his own limitless and risky desire to gather Everything, symbolized by the globe in the ear-theatre, by the nine planets, and by the totality mentioned in the title. A desire destined, nevertheless, to become lost in the black hole of the cavern-ear, evoking a zero.

1 The photograph reproduces the engraving Artist Recording Assyrian Bas-reliefs, taken from A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, vol. 2 (London: 1849).
2 This is the eye that reflects the interior of the theatre designed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux for Besançon. Cf. C.N. Ledoux, L’Architecture, vol. 2 (Paris: 1804), p. 113.
3 The correspondence between the artist and the nine interlocutors – Mario Diacono, Rudi Fuchs, Remo Guidieri, Pontus Hulten, Françoise Lambert, Sol LeWitt, Dora Stiefelmeier, Cy Twombly, Gianfranco Verna – is published in Ultime, exhibition catalogue, Radda in Chianti, Castello di Volpaia, 1986, pp. 98-105. The French expression, put forward as a reason for reflection to the nine friends, is taken from a declaration made by Louis XIV to his Minister Colbert around 1661: “Nous devons faire en sorte d’avoir en France tout ce qu’il y a de beau en Italie” (We must do what is necessary for France to have all that Italy has that is beautiful).