The paintings Nicola de Maria showed here can be divided into three distinct groups: those in which expansive fields of color and geometry are dominant; those in which the incision, the scratch or the scripted mark is emphasized; and those that partake of more traditional painterly depiction.

Dominated by primary colors and simple configurations of circles, rectangles, triangles and starlike forms, De Maria’s seemingly childlike works suggest a quasi-theological notion of origin. The materials and the forms he calls into representation seem to proceed from an intentionally ahistorical conception

Philippe Cazal represents a new French neo-Conceptualism, which focuses analysis less on the specific language of art, than on the system that legitimizes the very existence of art as a specialized activity. In comparing the art system with information systems in general, these artists acknowledge the differences, but more importantly they emphasize analogies. If the mass media remove experience from the realm of the real, transforming reality into spectacle, then these artists foreground the unreality of the spectacle through an ironic transmigration of signs.

In 1982 Philippe Cazal entrusted