Who is Eric? He wears a mask, but maybe it is his face. As in some African rituals, who wears a mask takes on its identity while the spirit takes hold of the person. But Eric is not a person. Even though its image is preserved in a narcissistic game which involves tapestries and paintings of exquisite craft and is trapped in a closed-circuit camera. He who has lived, if anything he had, the apartment in Via Bellezia 14 in Turin, has left chilling simulacra, chromium-free, only blacks and whites. Remains of a presence but also of an apparition. Traces of an evoked life, not lived. Seven black leather briefcases hermetically closed, there is something in or are they mockingly empty? A pair of suspenders, trousers, and that strange metallic mask where the eyes, nose and mouth are drawn with primitive traits, too accentuated. As if to mark a presence that is probably just a fiction. Or a totem, as it appears when the implants are fitted together. Or, maybe, someone has worn Eric’s clothes and has embodied his obsessions. We see them in a video, where it also acts, as a sort of alter ego, a neurotic doll with geometric traits. Annoyingly naive, how basically is the protagonist. Perhaps, more than basic, a primitive kind of archetype of the conflicts which grab our soul. However, we never enter in contact with Eric, because his whole life unfolds between reality and unreality, as it is often the life that one would want living. Anchored to something that exists and that, in his alleged concrete, refers to something that is not there. A necessary ghost.
