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In looking towards monochromy, precisely where the meanings of the diaphanous, the immaterial and the intangible are determined, each one of my self-portraits comes across like an emergence, and an effacement.
In these pictures my face is disppearing behind a glass comma which was drawn the exact size of my head and blown in Murano after the fonts designed by Giambattista Bodoni in Parma between 1771 and 1788.
A comma is the smallest bit of language, it appears to be even lighter than a simple dot, less meaning-full and less definitive. The commas made in glass, reflective and fragile, are a simple respiration hanging up in the space. These small comma sculptures form a series of Respiration Pieces.
This paradoxical representation of a figure with a glass comma mask melting into the monochromy aims at a signification beyond the image. My self-portrait is presented each time like an impossibility, a powerlessness, and a precariousness. It is this effect of incompleteness which rejects the ultimate meaning of the image in a beyondness of the image.
There is an ambiguity here which has to do with this unfillable distance between the gaze and its object, and the abyss which points to place beyond the image in which the meaning of all representation is at once revealed and clouded.
In all, I look at my self-portrait with a kind of anxiety like a pure image, otherwise put, like a fascinating and fearsome power, which its sense projects beyond itself.
