The figure of the “cup” originated out of the artist’s research into the form of the circle at the beginning of the 1980s. It would later find full expression in the work Stanza delle tazze (Room of Cups), 1986, presented for the first time at Mario Pieroni’s gallery in 1986 and then in the group exhibitions Correspondentie Europa at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1986) and Eternal Metaphors: New Art from Italy at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC (1989).

The work is made up of eight cups of semicircular shape, each made out of a piece of canvas applied to a sheet of copper and treat- ed with wax, pigment, colors of vegetable origin and gold. Perceived as three-dimensional solids, but in reality in just two dimensions, the “cups” appear to float lightly in space. Without any immediate contingency and freed from gravity and weight, they are part of a personal planetarium and are impregnated with what Italo Calvino calls the “lightness of thoughtfulness”: “Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a dif- ferent space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irra- tional. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.”

For the artist the “cup” is an introspective figure since, as a container that holds a content, it is connected symbolically with a person’s emotional and relational side: “Its significance lies in the fact that you are a cup and I too am a cup. Being a cup is part of this emotional component of communication” (Salvadori).