Fuori tempo (III), 2021-22

The magnifying glass, resting on two staggered palettes, seems to seek the ideal centre – marked by the intersection of the diagonals traced in red ink – like in crosshairs. The palettes consist of a white palette-shaped paper and a wooden palette. The torn and scattered photographic fragments reproduce details of the palette of Édouard Manet. The black and white photograph of Lake Nemi also recalls the image of a palette,1 suggested by the “finger hole” generated by the way the wooden and the white shapes are arranged so that they are askew. At the centre, the magnifying glass is tangential to the face of a clock, borrowed from a reproduction of the painting The Philosopher’s Conquest (1913-14) by Giorgio de Chirico. The dizzying circular dynamic of the search for a focal point is heightened by the plexiglas round set down on the assemblage, which seems to stop the “mobile” elements that are incongruous to each other.
Through the image of the palette and the reference to two of his favorite painters from the past, the artist’s aim is to pay homage to Painting. Similarly, the reference to another dimension with respect to the present, referred to by the title and made evident by the Dechirichian clock, celebrates the “timeless” dimension of painting, which is extraneous to both a chronological evolution and to the definition of an “exact time.”
The number in the title inscribes the work in a series of three variants on the same theme, which began in 2020 (cf. GPO-1092 and GPO-1114).

1 The image of the palette-lake was first conceived in 1983, with the works on paper titled L’exil du cygne and the print edition with the same title (cf. GPC-0638, GPE-0046); in 1985 it was also used for the works linked to the theme of Painting abandoned (cf. GPO-0561, GPC-0682).