Come è / Come se, 2025

The plexiglas portrait holder contains a photographic reproduction of a portrait holder with a black passepartout. Inside the cut-out of the passepartout is a white card that is slanted. The plexiglas portrait holder is set down on black frame enclosing a white sheet, a black card stock, and a white passepartout.
In this chimerical alternation of mute, white, or black surfaces, the elements at play, all of them askew in relation to the others, seem to be seeking, via echoes and reflections, a correspondence that remains latent, suspended between illusion and reality. Indeed, the title recalls the inextricable dilemma between being and appearing, that is to say, the very enigma of representation. The photographic portrait holder appears "as If" real, but it is instead an image, echoing an absent original. The elements arranged on the surface of the plinth are instead real, “as they are”, but can only find their “truth” in the relationship with the photographic image.
The same title was used for a small group of works made in 2014 (GPO-1037, GPO-1041, GPE-0130), based on a completely different iconography, however.