Presenze, assenze (1982) unfolds across the canvas as a meditation on the threshold between visibility and disappearance, rendered in Mario Raciti's characteristic vocabulary of pale, luminous washes layered over fragile pencil marks. The upper portion of the composition breathes in cool aquamarine and lavender, suggesting an atmospheric expanse in which a ghostly architectural form, barely sketched in graphite, appears to hover at the summit of a swelling white mass. This central volume, rounded and soft as accumulated snow or a draped figure, dominates the picture plane with a quiet monumentality, its surface modulated by the subtlest gradations of cream and violet that reward sustained looking. Toward the lower register the painting opens into greater complexity and tension. Loose, searching pencil lines accumulate into figurative suggestions, human forms or their remnants, caught in states of dissolution or emergence. Accents of crimson, used sparingly but decisively, introduce a note of bodily presence against the prevailing pallor, anchoring the composition to something felt rather than simply observed. The mixed media approach is central to the work's meaning: the interplay between the translucency of diluted paint and the immediacy of drawn marks creates a layered temporality, as though the image has been simultaneously built up and worn away by time. Raciti worked throughout the late 1970s and 1980s as one of the most thoughtful voices in Italian painting to navigate the space between figuration and abstraction, between psychological interiority and pictorial surface. Presenze, assenze belongs to a sustained body of work in which the human figure is never entirely present nor entirely absent, always in a condition of becoming or fading. The title itself frames this condition as the painting's true subject, a phenomenological inquiry into what it means for something, or someone, to occupy a space. At 100 by 70 centimeters, the canvas is intimate in scale, designed for close, private encounter rather than public spectacle. For a collector drawn to works that reward contemplation and carry genuine philosophical weight, this piece represents Raciti at a moment of sustained confidence and lyrical precision.