L’arte di non esserci, 2018-19

The ensemble of six framed sheets in plexiglas cases, arranged at short intervals so as to form a painting, feature at the centre a male figure in coat-tails holding up a blank square (intended as a sheet or a blank canvas). Other squares outlined in pencil and several sheets with geometric studies, scattered all around, multiply and disperse, as if in a magic trick, the picture of a panting.
The protagonist hiding behind the “game of surfaces” is a stand-in for the artist, who deliberately subtracts himself from our gaze – as suggested by the title – in favour of the “theatre” of the work, its artifices, and its illusions or presumed becoming.