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gest hall he’d set up a series of projects he
was working on at the time. There were com-
plex structures of wood and wire to which he
had affixed paper silhouettes, painted in a
very detailed way on both sides. On the two
walls there was a series of drawings and pain-
tings on paper, and then a structure formed
by boxes that allowed two large canvases to
remain vertical, balanced on the floor. I would
like to tell you in more detail about this struc-
ture. It seemed like a screen, but composed
of only two modules, the first two meters tall
and two and a half wide; the other a little
smaller but about the same height. The canvas
was crude, if I remember correctly, cotton,
and untreated. I asked him if that was a pain-
ting he was beginning, and he said no, it was
almost finished. Noting my perplexity, he
spoke to me about the work and pointed to a
spot in the top left between the wooden frame
and canvas. In that small part of the structure
he had painted a number of figures in a very
precise way; there were animals, people, and
plants that existed in an abstract landscape.
He had also inserted a small sculpture.
This intervention fascinated me: what he had
painted would not have worked on a 20 x 15
cm canvas, but made total sense in relation
to the rest of this structure; its being so detai-
led balanced perfectly with the emptiness of
the two large canvases. The structure for the
painting, held in balance on the floor, contai-
ned a small pictorial intervention that balan-
ced the huge void.
I was fascinated by the way he questioned the
limits a pictorial composition can have, ex-
tending beyond its canonical boundaries, put-
ting into question the structure, taking on the
risks and responsibilities that this operation
entails.
That same evening we met again for a drink.
Walking around Milan we began a conversa-
tion that was a little delusional. At that time I
was starting to be interested in how works of
art manage to give experiences to visitors that
come to see them in exhibition spaces. I do
not know why, but I began to wonder what
animals might think of the matter. We were
talking about this, and Valerio told me that
for a while he’d had the image in his mind of
a bird scampering on his painted canvas. We
began to imagine a painting exhibition not for
human beings but for birds, and we agreed
we should do it. Almost a year later we opened
the exhibit in Turin, titled Trasformazione
Permanente di un Mago in Formica.
The show consisted of a canvas 80 square me-
ters, which completely covered the floor area
of the exhibition space. The canvas, as well
as of the terracotta sculptures and other works
in the show, was painted with shapes and color
fields that birds could find in nature: the red
of autumn leaves, the green of moss, the brown
of bark. A group of birds, the true public for
the project, inhabited the exhibition for its
entire duration, sleeping in the sculptures,
walking on the canvas, and eating seeds from
the tables.
The show culminated in a room where a thea-
ter spotlight illuminates a circular portion of
the floor filled with all the materials used to
make the works. This is where the transfor-
mation that is refered to in the title occurs: a
magician decides to be transformed irrever-
sibly into an ant, it is unknown whether acci-
dentally or of his own free will.
Let's analyze why this hypothetical magician
decided to do that. Was it his choice? Tired of
the constant upheavals and return of history,
did he decide to forego the knowledge of a li-
fetime to take a point of view far from the hu-
