“Fine” senza fine (Vis-à-vis), 2020

The two photographs set up at a certain distance from each other each reproduce, on a smaller scale, one half of the work by Paolini entitled Vis-à-vis (Amazzone) (I), 2019 (GPO-1087). In the space before them, in the area corresponding to the interval between the two images, is a plinth on which are fragments of the plaster cast of a female bust. Other fragments from the same cast are scattered on the floor all around the plinth, as if they had fallen there.
An image broken down into two parts that are specular to each other, and the broken pieces of a cast: the dissociation that subtracts from the gaze the vision of a whole figure does not, however, prevent us from hypothesizing an image of that same figure. The supposed "end" is in fact "endless" as the title tells us: one work is followed by another work, the echo of the previous work inspires the one that comes after, everything is reflected and multiplied, but nothing is definitively completed. In the artist's own words: "No end is ever truly an end – from every presumed end something else is born".1

1 G. Paolini in conversation over the radio with Elena Del Drago in A3 Il formato dell’arte, RAI 3, 11 October 2020.