NADA New York 2025

Saccomazzone Players jumps between pathways due to the image’s immediate legibility.

The representational image on the dual panels comes from a reference image of a bronze: Saccomazzone Players, Orazio Mochi, 1616-1626. In the 17th century Italian game of Saccomazzone, two blindfolded youths pummeled each other with knotted cloth, without removing their other hand from a shared central object.

Backlit, the pairs’ mutual antagonism is set against a blinded state of phenomenal, anticipatory dread, chalk-pale yellow. The placement of the left pair, with rectangular piece of detritus and router scuff, and mirrored right pair, at a faint rise and pivot, sets off a series of offsets. Tiny gloss-black orbs are placed at specific points on the panels, with the sequence of insertion, decisions planned in advance by order of focal importance. The orbs are inserted in this order, minutely adjusted at each step in accordance with the accidental lean of the preceding countersink drill hole. Hanging from the bottom, brass rod with decorative fingernail clippings suggest a final tilt. These finely tempered adjustments, set against the closely finished yet visceral surface of the plaster, tune an uncanny optical pitch.