Sipario per la Wdi accompagnamento Wiener Staatsoper, 2002

The curtain installed at the Wiener Staatsoper during the 2002-03 season is part of the initiative promoted by the Museum in progress of Vienna, which invites one artist every year to conceive a design for a curtain.1 In Paolini’s contribution the detail of a curtain repeated four times and gradually rotated 90° resembles, thanks to the golden fringes, the frame of a painting. The central image reproduces several objects and requirements for the stage, which stand out against the night-time sky as if they fluctuated between the stars.
Akin to the gaze behind the scenes of a theatre, the elements represented in the “painting” are “waiting for a place or a role” – writes the artist – that is, they announce a performance that is yet to come, just like the lowered curtain precedes the performance. And just as the curtain delimits the space of the scene, so the frame of the picture also constitutes a material threshold between the virtual space of the representation – connoted by an imaginary dimension, subtracted from the gravitational force – and the real world on this side of that insuperable limit.

1 This is the fifth work commissioned by the museum in progress as part of the exhibition series that began in 1998 in collaboration with the Wiener Staatsoper, with the support of the Kulturstiftung der Deutschen Bank and the Deutsche Bank of Vienna. The projects selected each year by a jury (in 2002 constituted by Kaspar König, Hans-Ulrich Obrist , and Nancy Spector) are enlarged digitally and printed on a PVC canvas; a magnet is then used to attach the canvas to the safety curtain (in German “Eiserner Vorhang”, hence the title of the exhibition series) of the Viennese theatre for the duration of the season.