The working process for printing this catalogue has directly involved the object dealt with which dematerializes, by in-absence doubling, the structure of an operatively concrete factory. The catalogue itself has proved to be a work in action, a further level of the installation, distant from the reproduction of existing objects and expression of an art in progress of producing books.
Once arrived at the stage of preparing the photolithographic equipment, a paradox appeared to the editors as a series of works although put there for everyone to see, in public even, did not exist according to known parameters. The colour selection for a four-colour print is carried out through digital scanning of an original or photograph. Here there are no "originals". Further stratifications contained in Paolo Ferrari’s initial work, preceding and at the basis of the plotter-paintings, apparently constituting the originals, are just like geological sediments in the evolution of the work, the fount of thinking, the matrix: the important thing is the plotter-paintings and the relationships they generate within the space-time of the in-absence installation. The panels are therefore elsewhere with respect to the starting point, as if de-materialized; even though they have been considerably enlarged in relation to the source, not only do they not lose information, but they also bring to light ‘subatomic’ elements and planes of matter, where this proves to be made up of nothing and not of something; they even embody, without being dominated by them, the cognitive and affective processes of the technicians who physically produced them, the results themselves that, as we know, computers sometime produce beyond any expectation (it seems that the binary system guiding them, makes them effective in detecting differences that the human eye, working analogically, tends to annihilate because of its implicit Gestaltpsychologie).
Then, how can we adopt the photolithographic process to reproduce this special matrix which no longer belongs to the order of analogy where the similar only recognizes what is similar? Apart from the difficult task of taking photographs of panels hanging several meters high in an environment which is unsuitable for being arranged as a photographic studio, this would have implied going back to an analogical process and breaking down a complex structure into separate particles. One would have had to start from the source files generating the plotter-paintings by digital printer. But those files were not immediately usable because the computers used and the technicians processing the original stratifications had not worked according to standards but to printing processes which differed from the offset method adopted for the catalogue, and also according to different patterns and purposes, between which no useful definitive conversion parameters could be established. So, one can now take into consideration either a photolithographic reinterpretation of the files on the grounds of the final trials of the plotter-paintings, those preceding the digital print of the panels, or a digital scanning of the matrices. The catalogue is thus a further stratification, a new reading implying a new relationship with the work, a stage which, while apparently giving a picture - in the usual terms of Homo sapiens’ perception - of the peculiarity of the in-absence installation, continually originates levels of it where the fixity of the source is dissolved: the beginning does not take its own imprinting with it and is therefore free to establish a difference from itself. There is no need for exact correspondence between Paolo Ferrari’s initial work, the plotter-paintings and the works appearing on the catalogue in their space-time relationship with the factory.
The visitor with the catalogue will experience a de-spacing effect in the attempt to connect the relationships ‘within difference’ between the panels introduced in the factory (and inclusive of the factory) and the printed pictures. Should he take into acount that those printed pictures and colours are in fact constituted by coloured points (black, yellows, cyano, magenta) otherwise orientated in the space of the printed page and mostly separated from each other by a white void wrapping them, he will understand a basic truth never before heard of: pictures are made of nothing, it’s only the eye which expresses a need to establish a continuum instead of recognizing discrete unities, to fill up a void, this being a ripetitive act which seems to come down to it direct from the old brain of the species through the optic nerve. Vision is not an optical fact but a forma mentis. This form is the one which the installation, and the catalogue with it, makes possible to change.

Luciano Eletti