Sottosopra, 2005

The work is made up of a primed canvas, hanging on the wall, and two music stands inserted into each other so that they are opposed, and propped up against the canvas. Two texts written by the artist on a blank sheet and on a sheet of manuscript music paper, are torn into numerous fragments, some of which held in between the music stands, while others are scattered on the canvas and on the wall. On the canvas, the four diagonals in the area corresponding to the corners suggest a rigorous spatiality, as opposed to the disorder of the “upside-down” scene arranged on this side of that unsurpassable threshold.
The two texts by the artist focus on the independence of the work of art with respect to its alleged author. The former, transcribed on a blank sheet, concerns the “handover procedure" between Verrocchio and Leonardo, while the latter, written on music manuscript paper, that between Rossini and Wagner. In both cases it is about the awareness, on the part of the elder artist, of the younger artist’s relevance.
The first text states as follows: "Of the many stories that overlap and are handed down in time (things seen or heard by our eyes and our ears but perhaps truer than true), it is said that Verrocchio dropped his pencil after seeing a drawing by an apprentice in his workshop. From that day forwards, History (Art History) subtracted the tool from the hands of the master (Verrocchio himself never again drew a line) to hand it to the younger Leonardo, to whom he entrusted the task of continuing the ‘works in progress’.
The second text continues from the first: "Similarly, another episode seems to renew the same procedure a while later, to confirm the same inexorable "transfer of powers" (which are not actually powers, as we shall see later). In short, it seems that Rossini, the great and undisputed master of his age, stopped writing music after having at length and with great suffering corresponded with Wagner. Hence, does the tool possess already within itself the writing it is called to decipher? Is the author’s voice mute if it isn’t echoed in the work that Time, time and again, assigns to writers, artists, musicians… to its trusted and devoted officials, "experts?”.