In ascolto (stanza dello spettatore), 2005

Twenty-four equidistant gilded frames hang on the wall and make up a grid of 4 x 6 units. At the vertices of this painting gallery are four images of a lamp, turned towards the central area. This is marked by a white passepartout held in a tilted position between two frames and by a collage of images that serves as the epicentre of an explosion of torn fragments, taken from photographic reproductions of previous works by the artist, or by distinctive motifs from his iconographic repertoire (four fragments are also scattered outside the grid of frames). On the wall a perspectival drawing represents a volumetric structure, which is located on a modular floor, and is observed by the male figure, sketched life-size in the foreground to the left.
Both the structure and the frames are a direct reference to the set design conceived by Paolini in the same period for Richard Wagner’s Valkyrie, in particular for Act Three, in which a gigantic metal structure at the centre of the stage is associated with gilded frames containing plaster casts. The work was in fact made for the artist’s solo show at Alfonso Artiaco at the same time as the performance of Wagner’s opera at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. The figure is instead a reproduction of the profile of Lucio Amelio, a former art dealer of Paolini in Naples, and previously the owner of the exhibition space for which the work was made.
Regardless of the specific references, the work evokes the space of the representation and the artifices that connote it. Through the illusions of drawing and photography, the character portrayed on the wall becomes the viewer at the forefront of the scene lit by four virtual lamps. The geometrical structure outlined in perspective and the grid of gilden frames – complementary to each other – as well as the white passepartout focus on the framing that is a prelude to the apparition of an image, to the becoming of a painting. The torn fragments, on their part, disperse the echoes of other works as the traces of the possible faces of the ideal Painting, symbolically evoked by the gilded frames of the same size as Disegno geometrico, 1960 (GPO-0001), the artist’s first work, conceptually understood as the painting that underlies all paintings, past, present, and future.
The title harkens back to that of a previous version of the same iconographic theme, made in 1999 and developed on four sides of a room, with a regular pattern of gilded frames and a perspectival drawing of an exhibition space with some viewers (GPO-0827).