Cythère, 1983-90

A colour photograph of the open sea, inside a metal frame with a glass sheet that is broken at the centre, is associated with an assemblage of canvases and stretchers, which are arranged around an upside-down easel that serves as a static pivot for the composition in precarious balance. An overturned canvas is held down in a slightly tilted position against the upper part of the photograph, another one is lying on the ground in contact with the tip of the easel, a third canvas is wedged in the stretcher inserted in the pole, while a second, smaller stretcher hangs in a tilted position at the height of the easel's canvas holder.
The work is part of a group of twelve variants with the same title, made between 1983 and 1994 (GPO-0483, GPO-0491, GPO-0503, GPO-0838, GPO-0522, GPO-0560, GPO-0575, GPO-0591, GPO-0634, GPO-0640, GPO-0675, GPO-0721), which are distinguished by the photograph (the various marine views were taken at different times) and by the intervention matched with the breaking of the glass. Each of the twelve episodes – the number refers to the hours in the day or the months in the year, understood as the maximum temporal dilation and index of cyclicity – evokes the inexorable, albeit unappeasable desire to conquer Cythera, the mythical island where Aphrodite (Venus for the Romans) was born, the ideal and notoriously unattainable destination. “A gesture, considered irremediable, instead resurfaces to design the distance from the horizon", wrote the artist with regard to the broken glass with the sea serving as a backdrop.1 The French title amplifies the resonance of the idyllic echo, causing the painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau, L’Embarquement pour Cythère (1717), as well as some of the lines by Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, to resound.2

1 G. Paolini, Suspense. Breve storia del vuoto in tredici stanze (Florence: Hopeful Monster editore, 1988), p. 177.
2 Cf. Charles Baudelaire, Voyage à Cythère, 1855 (in Les fleurs du Mal); Paul Verlaine, Cythère, 1869 (in Fêtes galantes).