Samples is a series of digital prints, each representing a line that corresponds to the length of certain routes taken by the artist between two places in several cities. The frame of the prints bears a phrase that indicates the starting point and that of arrival, and the distance in between. The series is accompanied by the text: “Each of these works is generated by a single, uninterrupted line that measures the exact distance between two places, persons, political, cultural and economic institutions of the city. These works belong to a catalogue of other images that can be made to measure and adapted to infinite persons, clients and cities”.

The work is designed as if it were a sample portfolio of drawings that can be custom made, in keeping with the desires of those who request them from the artist. Each drawing thus defines a link – between people, institutions, entities – in which its client plays a crucial role, since he or she is the true “initiator” of the work. “I consider the client not only the person who offers the possibility of making the work – the artist says – but also a fundamental dialectical pole of the work’s formulation. I am interested in constraints and limits because they contain challenges that often lead to experimentation and advancement” [Barbara Casavecchia and Viktor Misiano, All’aperto. Alberto Garutti, Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2009].

Samples is a work that reflects on the dynamics of power that are involved in artistic production. Granting an aesthetic value to the representation of a distance – of the distance between the exhibition space and other places that have particular importance in the context of the same city – the artist challenges the “sincerity” of the creative gesture, inserting it instead in a framework of more complex relations, namely the art system.