Der Wächter (The Guard) is the portrait of someone I knew, a gloomy, murky, fascinating individual. He was witty, elegant, well-read, endued with supreme manners and sangfroid. There was something esoteric about his appearance, as if his job were to connect this world to the other one. The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", that's him.

This ceramic work is made up of 32 tiles (module size 26,5 x 19,5 cm). The clay body was covered with black and white engobes following the design of an ink drawing that I had realised beforehand. 
The drawing is set up with “visual sampling”, an idea I came up with while working with a musician on La statua che respira. The samples are taken from my own artwork and other interesting visual elements I come across and become a series of symbols or letters of an imaginary alphabet, which I combine, stretch, zoom in and out, fragment, etc. and rearrange according to patterns that I develop. 

"Komposition 1" is in Rome at Latteria Trastevere, Vicolo della Scala. 

Visual samples printed and painted onto pre-existing pencil drawings and prints and arranged according to the arrangement of the Sephirot.

The Museum has a huge mouth that looks like a swimming pool and sucks in works of art, inexorably. Once they're in, they're dead. Its classicistic and fascist attributes (entrance portal, caryatids, chimneys) indicate a German nightmare you definitely want to escape. In fact, my first draft (ink on paper, 80 x 60 cm) and the plaster relief based on it (same size) show a person trying to leave the pool. The whole structure has an uncertain perspective that seems to fall backwards toward a gloomy sun. 

I made the final version after a few years spent in Italy and the fleeing figure was gone. The Museum became a flat, irregular tryptich with a ravening hole that attracts the eye. You can plunge headfirst into it and disappear.