Di-stanza, 1996-97

Across a photograph of a perspectival drawing, a collage scatters the fragments of a portrait drawn by the artist with a drawing pin in the area corresponding to his left eye. The dispersion of the torn fragments originates from the eye, which at the same time coincides with the perspective's vanishing point. Arranged on the plinth located at a certain distance from the painting are other fragments of the same self-portrait – they are applied to a blank sheet and held down by a plexiglas sheet – and two t-squares wedged one inside the other.
The title implies a game of words involving the term "distance", which refers to both the material distance between the plinth and the painting, and the conceptual one between the place of representation, inside the painting, and the real space on this side of that inaccessible "room" ("stanza" means "room" in Italian.) In one case as well as in the other, the distance that separates the parts of the work leaves the vision of a completed unit "at a distance".