Ipotesi per una mostra (otto per otto), 2000

The work commissioned for a corridor that leads to a series of offices is installed on two walls interrupted by a passageway. Forty black frames lined up in four rows marked by the steel profiles make up an irregular grid of fulls and voids. Some of the frames enclose straight lines, which in the work as a whole recall eight paintings; other frames are empty, and others still reproduce the details of figures that together allude to eight viewers of the eight hypothetical paintings (hence the title "otto per otto" [eight by eight]).1
The work harkens back to the idea underlying the project with the same title conceived in 1963 (GPO-0051), which involved the public’s encounter with several pre-existing viewers, in turn intent on looking at some paintings. In the work made in 2000, the conceptual assumption is rendered in even more ambiguous and complex terms: the figures appear inside the paintings, as if they were the figured subject, but at the same time they also act as the viewers of the same paintings and therefore as the stand-ins for the real viewers, intent on observing them.

1 At times the image of the figure is applied to the wall and framed by the cut-out of the passepartout; other times it is sketched out in pencil on framed sheets. Some of the figures are seen from behind, others are turned towards us. As a whole they are evoked in a different scale, as if they were scattered about at a variable distance.