Contemplator enim, 1991

On the projecting part of an encircling wall, framed by two pilaster strips, carved in black in a glass sheet is the drawing of a room seen in perspective, with two doors at the back. This overlaps a continuous frieze made of linear rectangles, carved in the cladding and continuing on the areas of the wall to the sides. In the overlapping of the two drawings, the rectangle between the two doors recalls a painting hanging on the back wall of the room portrayed on the glass. Twelve fragments of a resin cast of a classical statue are distributed in random order on the wall, most of which gravitating close to the carved sheet, as if they emerged from the virtual space of the drawing. At the top and centre, the intervention features bronze lettering with the words in Latin from the title (“behold thus”). The words are from a passage in Lucretius’ De rerum natura, in which the gaze is invited to contemplate the movements of the atoms caught in the beam created by the rays of sunlight that have filtered into a dark room.1
The work was commissioned for the garden of the home of Christian Stein in Milan in May 1991. The title and the iconography harken back to two works made during the same year (GPO-0681, GPO-0683), in which, with the complicity of the title, the empty stage of the empty room invites the viewer to observe the silent scene that is a prelude to the manifestation of a possible and unpredictable apparition.
The theme both formally and conceptually constitutes a central moment in the early 1990s (cf. among others, the artist's publication entitled Contemplator enim [Florence: Hopefulmonster editore, 1991]).

1 Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book II, I. 114 ff.