Una doppia vita, 2007

Two groups of fourteen framed elements – two of which halved – are arranged to suggest the framing of a large painting (the empty central area originates from the first presentation of the work on a wall interrupted by a window). The frames are white or black and include the reproduction, in positive against a white background, or in negative against a black one, of the drawing of a room viewed in perspective, with two passageways on the back wall.1 Inside and outside the rectangle determined by the framed elements several rectangles of the same size suggest other units of a composition in the making. Midway up the wall, two semicircular fragments reproduce the image of an eclipse.
At a short distance from the wall, in a central position, a transparent plexiglas plinth serves as a support for a case, which is also transparent, whose four sides are etched with the drawing of a room marked by two doors.2 The case, which recalls an exhibition room, hosts a crumpled copy of the image against a black background arranged on the wall. The plinth instead encloses two other dark grey plexiglas volumes, which are in turn shaped like a case atop a plinth.
The title emphasizes the duplicity connoting the work: the vertigo of the Two or the double that amplifies and multiplies, but at the same time moves away and loses the One.3 The continuity of the image on the wall is interrupted, the focal centre is empty (just as is the space represented in the images); the pattern of the rectangles and frames is an incomplete mosaic; the crumpled image in the case is undecipherable. In other words: the gaze cannot capture anything definite and is lost in the enigma of a work in search of its own definition.

1 The drawing, which is of the entrance to the artist's Turin home, dates to the group of works titled Contemplator enim, developed in 1991 (cf. GPO-0681).
2 The etched drawing, which recalls the one represented in the framed elements, is identical to the one used for the first versions of the work Ultimo modello, 1992 (GPO-0704), as well as for the work Una vita normale, 2005 (GPO-0900).
3 Among other things, the title is closely tied to the area of the first presentation of the work, in Milan in 2007, where all the new works made for the twofold exhibition project (presented at Galleria Christian Stein and at Giò Marconi at the same time) featured a title that included the word "vita" (life) (Una vita normale, GPO-0952, Vite parallele, GPO-0954, La vita eterna, GPO-0955). At Galleria Christian Stein, the “duplicity” of Una doppia vita was also inspired by the window, which suggested the articulation of the work in two parts that mirrored each other.