Fuori l’autore, 1989

Three sheets of drawing paper placed at short intervals portray the perspective drawing of a room. Standing out at the centre is a life-size portrait of the artist thinking. In the area corresponding to the pupil of his left eye a drawing pin holds down the first (real) sheet of a pile of virtual sheets, which in turn seem to be hanging on the rear wall of the room and held in the trajectory of the artist’s gaze.1 This image is overlapped by three pages of a typescript reproduced on tracing paper, with the middle sheet located in the area corresponding to the sheets tacked in the eye. The typescript entitled like the work itself and bearing a text by the artist,2 is signed and dated the day of the opening of the solo show where the work was shown for the first time (“7 October 1989”). On the three framed elements several sheets of drawing paper of the same size as the ones reproduced in the lithographic image are distributed in random order; some of them are actually applied, while others are merely suggested by the rectangles outlined in pencil traced over the drawing of the room.
The title is a double entendre referring to the figure of the author, which was the focus of most of the artist's works in the 1980s: if, on the one hand, the locution imperatively invites the author to exit the scene – in order to leave the field to the work and its presumed becoming – on the other, the locution invites the author to reveal his own identity, to declare himself (akin to what happens at the end of a performance when the public calls for the author to come to the stage).

1 The profile of the face traced over a portrait made by the photographer Gérard Amsellem in 1983 and delineated over the image of the pile of sheets of drawing paper was made in lithographic form for a series of works entitled Senza titolo (Ni le soleil ni la mort...), exhibited at the Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris in the spring of 1989 (cf. from GPC-0753 to GPC-0755).
2 The text is reproduced in an unabridged version in F. Poli, Giulio Paolini (Turin: Lindau, 1990), p. 151.