Contemplator enim, 1991-04

Twenty framed elements placed close together each reproduce the same drawing of a room seen in perspective, with two doors at the rear – in the first two rows the drawing is upside down – in which inserted each time are one or more photographic views of another architecture.1 Applied to the glass of the frames are images of other details of the room with two doors, while spreading out from the focal point of the whole – at the viewer’s eye level – is a sunburst outlined in red ink on all the frames.
The contrast of the perspectives – that of the room with two doors, repeated in the single elements, and that of the whole of the painting, suggested by the sunburst – suspends the legibility of a univocal image. If the multiplied view of the same room is subtracted from a clear identity – the repetition and the insertions disperse the singularity and the autonomy of the image –, the overall view implied by the sunburst suggests a view of another room, it too discontinuous and composite (the two upper rows evoke the ceiling, while the two lower ones the floor).

1 The drawing of the room with the two doors reproduces the entrance hall of the artist’s home, a motif introduced in 1991 in the series of works titled Contemplator enim (hence the two dates and the title of the work, cf. GPO-0681). The photographic details are instead taken from the reproductions of the Hall of Sculpture at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; indeed, the elements of the work come from Contemplator enim, made in 1992 for Carnegie International (cf. GPO-0688), where the twenty elements were arranged in the manner of a frieze along the trabeation that divides the two levels of the marble colonnade in the same Hall of Sculpture at the Carnegie Museum of Art.