Immacolata Concezione. Senza titolo / Senza autore

The image at the centre of the black sheet reproduces an eye socket, which contains the visual field of the male figure depicted, reclining in a room and intent on drawing, as suggested by the pencil in his left hand and the image of the same room that he is holding in front of him. A white rectangle, inserted in the area corresponding to the figure, duplicates the idea of a drawing in progress and acts as the generating nucleus of a multitude of “sheets” that gradually become smaller in size, as if they were drawings gradually put aside by the author. The multiplication is reinforced by the rectangles outlined in pencil on the “sheets” and on the photographic image.

In this game of correspondences, the gaze of the figure reproduced, that of the author and that of the viewer (we who are looking from inside the eye socket) are identified in a single gaze, captured as it is occurring and the full-fledged subject of the work. In the artist’s own words: “Vision is as if circumscribed, framed, caught by surprise from behind the scenes, behind the eye of the figure that both sees and is seen. His and our gaze overlap and coincide in the focus on the sheet that, both he and we, are observing: I observe the object and the subject of a ‘mandatory’ vision and I observe myself observing”.