Cythère, 1983-85

A colour photograph of the open sea, framed by a metal frame with glass sheet that is broken at the centre, includes, in the area corresponding to the epicentre of the fragmentation, the crumpled up and nearly unrecognizable poster of the solo exhibition at the Galleria Marilena Bonomo in Bari, where the work was presented for the first time.
The work is the first of a series of twelve works with the same title, made from 1983 to 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, intended 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).