Castelli di carte, 1993

The eight collages on green cardstock, arranged close together in a horizontal or a vertical direction in the manner of the cards in a game of solitaire, each present a different arrangement of blue playing cards, some of which seen from the back, others from the front. Strewn about in between the cards – of the same format as the playing cards – is a photographic reproduction in blue tone of a painting by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (Le château de cartes, ca. 1737), in which a young man amuses himself by building castles of cards on a green game table.
Whereas the reference to Chardin evokes the genre of the vanitas, the card player is an implicit stand-in for the author, who on his own work table is constantly shuffling his cards, aware that every new configuration is a relative episode with respect to the "absolute" work that escapes every attempt at appropriation.
The same theme was developed in two other later variants, made in 1994 (GPO-0722) and in 1995 (GPO-0766), respectively.