Venere (Vergine, Vertigine...), 2003

Twenty-five stretchers are arranged between the ceiling and the floor, evoking a dizzying fall (some of them are suspended, others are lying on the floor, scattered across the platform). The stretchers are of the same dimensions as Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), which was the focus of the exhibition for which the work was conceived. A long unstretched canvas crosses and holds the stretchers, eventually dropping down onto the platform. At the viewer’s eye level, the cloth partially covers a primed canvas – of the same dimensions as the painting by Titian – which features outlined the life-sized detail of Venus’s two hands as they are portrayed in the sixteenth-century painting.
In the artist’s intentions, the gesture drawn on the canvas is at the same time a “copy” and an “original”: on the one hand, it proposes two life-sized hands (hence, “original” ones) intent on holding or presenting a hypothetical painting; on the other, the gesture recalls or causes the viewer to imagine the specific painting by Titian, of which it reproduces the hands (hence, “copies” of the sixteenth-century ones).
The three terms making up the title underscore the “dizziness”– the dizzying challenge – that the artist finds himself facing each time from scratch, before a blank or “virgin” canvas, in the attempt to just touch “Venus”, the goddess of Beauty, who famously escapes every attempt at being possessed. Or, in other words: every new work encourages the artist to renew the “dizziness” implicit in the search for Beauty (represented by Venus), which is ineffable and intangible – hence, “virginal” by definition.