Synopsis (Quattro parti), 2006

The four parts arranged at the centre of the four sides of a room and each of which made up of two framed elements – a larger one cut out in the manner of a passepartout, the smaller one with collage-like insertions – produce an alternating succession of blank and photographic frames (shots and reverse shots of the artist’s studio). The central vanishing point of the telescopic perspective coincides with the image of an easel, which alternately is empty and allows the viewer to glimpse the canvases propped up against the wall, or else is associated with a white or black surface, recalling a “blind” painting. One of the elements also includes an anonymous viewer seen from behind, a stand-in for both the author and the spectator. In between these four “parts” – as indicated by the subtitle – a drawing of squares outlined on the wall echoes in alternating succession the formats of the various frames that succeed one another inside each part (with the addition of a larger module that inscribes it in the continuity of the frieze). At the viewer’s eye level, the horizon line is cadenced at regular intervals by small regular squares that are the same size as the painting on the easel. The title reproduces that of two works made in 1998, based on a photograph of the studio in conversation with several primed canvases (cf. GPO-0800, GPO-0801). In this case as well, the “synopsis” was understood as a compendium of distinct spatio-temporal situations: on the one hand, the painting on the easel in the artist’s studio, “already” seen by the photographic lens; on the other, the painting in fieri, which in the here-and-now of the exhibition reveals itself to be an unknown still to come into being. The passepartout frame, the artist’s studio, the easel, the observer, and the telescopic perspective: everything is a foretaste to the viewing of a painting, which from one element to another, however, moves away for as far as the eye can see.
The same theme was developed in four small-scale variants made the same year, without the drawing on the wall (GPO-0931, GPO-0932, GPO-0933, GPO-0934).