Contemplator enim, 1991

The work conceived on the occasion of the event “Carnegie International 1991” is made up of twenty framed collages, which for the purposes of the exhibition were installed in the manner of a frieze along the trabeation dividing the two levels of the marble colonnade in the Hall of Sculpture of the Carnegie Museum of Art. All the elements reproduced the same perspective drawing of an empty room, which each time gathered photographic fragments of the Hall of Sculpture, so that the views of the two different spaces co-penetrated each other.
The words in Latin in the title, which mean “behold thus”, 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 title and the motif of the room are conceived with two works made during the same year, 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 (cf. GPO-0681, GPO-0683).

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