Dalle tele alle stelle, 2001

The lighting design conceived for the Christmas decorations of Lodi’s main street consists of a central nucleus and a series of individual elements that thin out.1 The central ensemble includes twenty-eight squares that both tilt and intersect one another, and is set in motion by an intermittent light mechanism underscoring the effect of the centrifugal expansion of the components. Starting from this constellation, fourteen shapes alternate in succession and gradually thin out towards the ends of the route. Thanks to a variable combination of quadrilaterals they take on star shapes.
As the title tells us, the development of the work leads from the “tele” (canvases) to the “stelle” (stars); that is, in a metaphorical key, it alludes to the itinerary that from the primed canvas leads to a completed form, belonging to an absolute and unattainable dimension, like the stars, magical sidereal bodies located light-years away. In other words, the work harkens back to the path without an arrival point towards the fulfilled work, which the artist always faces from scratch when he is before the blank surface of a canvas or a sheet of paper, weighing up the endless hypotheses of imagining a “painting” (evoked by the potentially limitless combinations of squares as well as via the centrifugal dynamic that enlivens the central constellation). In the artist’s own words: “The painting, before announcing and defining itself as such, as an achieved and fulfilled unit, belongs to the magma of hypotheses and visions that, while pursuing and becoming mixed with one another, crowd an artist’s visual field”.2

1 The artist had originally envisaged a centrifugal installation in a single piazza, a sort of “big bang” involving an explosion of quadrilaterals starting from the close-knit central nucleus, imagined to be a spheroid mass. During the phase of execution, the initial idea was adapted to develop in extension along the city streets, and the central part was modified in a more horizontal and flattened shape. The task commissioned from the artist in 2001 was conceived in the wake of the lighting displays commissioned from contemporary artists from the late 1990s in Turin as part of the initiative known as “Luci d’artista”.
2 G. Paolini, unpublished note to the work, September 2001; manuscript held in the artist’s archive.