Abat-jour, 1988

A large upside-down canvas, surmounted by a crumpled star chart, teeters atop a globe placed at the centre of a chessboard that is the same size as the canvas, arranged on the ground by means of sixty-four square units held down by four plexiglas sheets placed close together. The white units consist of blank pieces of card stock, while the photographic ones are views of the sky (clear, cloudy, in the colours of the dawn and the dusk, with or without details of the landscape).
If the star chart represents the utmost visual aperture possible, the globe is a simulacrum of the world intended as an ensemble of every possible subject; the pictures of the sky harken back to the arc of a day understood as the maximum temporal expansion, while the chessboard is the pre-eminent place of conjecture. By way of the blank canvas that touches Everything, shielding the outcome of the contact in the manner of an abat-jour (as indicated in the title), the work stages the game of the representation itself, that is, the artist's desire to make a fulfilled vision his own. A risky “game”, actually, a “forbidden” one, as suggested by the overturned canvas and the crumpled map (a metonymy of the ruined sky on the ground).
The same theme was formulated in a first version, made in 1986 (GPO-0567).