«The artwork is not the result of the author’s beliefs or intentions: the artist merely finds himself conceiving something that belongs to the artwork itself. The dynasty of works from antiquity to today is self-generated and the unity between the work from millennia ago and that of tomorrow means that today’s work cannot be separated from this trajectory. What informs today’s work is, therefore, the echo of something that already exists or will exist in the future. For this reason the author does not say, he limits himself to producing the things he has received as a gift and that he has been able to create thanks to the knowledge and identification with something that has already existed and that is presumed to exist again, thus resetting, in artificial terms, the trajectory of time».
Giulio Paolini, “Un posto vuoto”, 2024, pencil, red pencil and collage on grey paper, 50 x 70 cm, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
These are the moving words with which Giulio Paolini introduced his new exhibition in Bologna at Studio G7, a gallery that boasts an intense collaborative relationship with the master starting from the first solo exhibition dedicated to him in 1975 and entitled “Collezione e altre grafiche”. Over the course of his long career, Paolini has dedicated himself to the analysis of the space of representation and the artifices on which his fictitious existence is based, focusing first on the topics of the double and perspective, and then directing his research towards a theatricalization of the exhibition act aimed at visualizing the relationships that the work establishes with the public and with the author. The incessant reworking of these themes is the engine of the infinite variations in which the artist has declined his unmistakable language over the years without ever losing clarity, inspiration and necessity. The most distinctive and surprising aspect of his poetics is the fact that he combines a rigorously conceptual language with impeccable aesthetics, the synergy of which manages to question at hte same time mind and emotion.
Giulio Paolini, “Finis terrae”, 2023, pencil, red pencil and collage on paper, 50 x 70 cm, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
“Un posto vuoto (An empty seat)”, the title of the exhibition, is also that of one of the works on display, perhaps the most direct emanation of the reasoning just mentioned. The collage depicts, in fact, an elegant armchair with an old-fashioned design seen from behind and overlooking a stylised perspective view whose lines, made explicit by hatching, tend towards infinity. The armchair, of which only one leg rests inside the representation, identifies the position of the author, now absent, with whom the artist identifies and who, in creating the work, had placed his eye in an all-encompassing position with respect to the architectural drawing. Beyond his point of view there is total space, the vertigo of the infinite he contemplated before disappearing and behind him, in the reference-free space of the dark passe-partout (antechamber of the spectator’s real space), an equally irreducible “nothing”. The same view, in which the space (at the same time measured and generated by an orthogonal grid) hosts the steps of a staircase and two facing rows of columns, returns in the collage “Finis terrae” (2024). Here, instead of the armchair, we find the image of a classical statue from behind, which we imagine blinded by the infinity of the space that the protagonism of its position offers to its gaze. Its dizziness originates from the dazzling idea that every spatial or architectural situation can be traced back with guiding lines to the infinity from which it flows and in which it consolidates.
Giulio Paolini, “L’Efebo”, 2024, plaster casts, white plinth, /four casts 44 x 23 x 23 each, four plinths 85 x 40 x 40 cm each, overall dimensions130 x 107 x 107 cm, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
The cornerstone of the exhibition introduced by these two works is the installation “Ultimo modello” (1992-2024), previously exhibited without the four busts titled “L’efebo” (2024) by which it is now surrounded, which here play the role of observers. The sculptural model under the glass case, the object of their imperturbable attention, represents in three dimensions the geometric design of the entrance room of the artist’s home. It is an open space, generated by the intersection of four transparent orthogonal walls, on each of which the outline of a door is drawn. The surface of the base, also transparent, is measured by a geometric grid on which some fragments of torn paper are arranged, depicting photographic prints of the artist’s studio and graphic abstractions, such as concentric circles and further perspective traces. Just as each piece of paper finds its counterpart beyond the vertical wall, the centrifugal estrangement is increased by the presence, in each of the partitions into which the room is divided and multiplied, of small mirrors similar in shape and size to the floor modules.
Giulio Paolini, “Ultimo modello”, 1992-2024, engraved plexiglas structure, collage on cardboard, fragments of xerox reproduction, reflecting plexiglas sheets, white plinth, plexiglas case, overall dimensions150 x 80 x 80, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
Contrary to their matrices, they seem to have rebelled against geometric constraints to wander freely on the ground and reflect the world at their own discretion. The paths of this conceptual space are traversed by four silhouettes of valets in ceremonial attire who welcome the visitor holding squares of emptiness. These obedient servants of a ceremony unknown to them are among the most recurrent figures in Paolini’s expressive vocabulary and demonstrate his intrinsic scenic vocation. Here they perform the function of animating the mysterious stripping and multiplication of the space dramatized in the work, which finds its fulcrum in the sky, a crumpled blue sheet placed high up at the intersection point between the walls, in relation to which everything re-aggregates despite the prevalence of divergent trajectories. Through these indicative fragments of a purely mental representation, the artist invites the spectator to share his condition as an exile who tries to escape from the usual space into the unlimited projections of infinity that imagination evokes.
Giulio Paolini, “Estasi di San Sebastiano”, 2024, xerox reproduction in plexiglas case, black pencil, gilt frame, collage on passepartout, plexiglas case, white plinth, overall dimensions 140 x 50 x 50 cm, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
The installation, as a whole also to be read as an inhabitable work with multiple vanishing points, is completed by “Vertigo” (2024), a neoclassical sculpture cloaked in sky fleeing towards a blind corner of the exhibition space and “Estasi di San Sebastiano”, a devotional secular display case in which the saint reaches bliss thanks to the pencil with which the artist pierces him, anchoring him to the center of a golden frame at a precise point of an immeasurable cosmic constellation. The exhibition, an exquisite distillation of the most significant facets of Giulio Paolini’s work, is made even more precious by his declared intention, which we hope is a charming quip, of wanting to thin out the exhibition commitments, always burdensome and stringent for a master of his caliber, to dedicate himself only to the creation of the works, which he lovingly defined as «his indispensable pastime».
Info:
Giulio Paolini. Un posto vuoto
24.09.2024-04.01.2025
Via Val D’Aposa 4A, 40123, Bologna
www.galleriastudiog7.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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