Cythère, 1983-87

A colour photograph of the open sea, framed by a metal frame with a glass sheet that is broken at the centre, gathers several pieces of plaster exploded between the breakage lines of the glass. Installed on the floor, in the area corresponding to the epicentre of the fragmentation, are a pair of plaster wings and the upper part of a plaster cast of the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles, while other isolated fragments are gradually scattered outwards.
The work is part 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 seascapes 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).