Natura morta (morte naturale), 2001

At the centre of the sheet contained in a plexiglas case and corresponding to the vanishing point of the perspectival drawing, the image of a golden frame outlines the empty rectangle made in the case, suggesting a painting propped up against a wall, on a floor with a modular pattern. Emerging from the framing of this “window” are the fragments of the colour reproduction of a seventeenth-century still life by Willem Kalf. Some of the fragments are held down in the cut-out of the photographic frame, others are applied to the wall that is glimpsed through the cut in the case, while a smaller one has fallen to the modular floor, and three others are scattered about outside the case.
The key to interpretation lies in the title, which joins the genre of the still life, recalled via the details of the Flemish painting, and the natural death suggested by the explosion of torn fragments: as if the subject of the still life provoked the decomposition of the painting.
The unstoppable and uncontrolled dissolution of the obscure fragments that flow over from the frame is deliberately offset by the limpid and classical layout of the perspectival representation, far-removed by virtue of its nature to the dissolution and metamorphoses proper to the natural processes.