Superficie Geometrica (1978)

A corner of a barred window. White-painted iron: one vertical bar, a horizontal one held by two rivets, two diagonals crossing above them. Behind, a pale surface on which the sun repeats all of it as shadow. On the right, an ochre wall, rough plaster, lit from the side.

I framed it closely so that the window would be hard to read as a window. What I was after was what remained: lines, the same lines again at another angle, and two colours meeting along a vertical edge. In those years I was looking at the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, and what stayed with me was their decision to treat the image as a surface rather than as an opening onto something else. The title comes from there.

In 1978, I took part in the annual group exhibition of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa and won the award for best photograph. This allowed me to participate in an exhibition the following year at the Foundation’s venue in Piazza San Marco, together with three other artists. The photograph was later acquired by the International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice.

It is held today in the permanent collection of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia – Ca’ Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, catalogued as a photograph, cm 25 × 20, inventory number BA0796.

I come back to this image often. The work I do now — the sheets of an unmade bed, the inside of a fridge, clouds — starts here: something ordinary, framed close enough that the geometry comes forward and the object gives way. Forty-eight years later I am still working on the same thing.