Requiem, 2003-04

The assemblage of elements in Requiem evokes a grand piano: a shaped wooden panel placed on three chairs represents the sound board, while a large shaped canvas serves as the open lid, upraised by a wooden pole. The keyboard consists of a rectangular panel set upon six magazine racks piled up irregularly on two chairs.
On the recto of the canvas shaped like a lid is a sheet of music score paper pierced by a black pencil and marked in autograph calligraphy with the signature, title, and date of the work. On the verso, under the stretcher bars is a cut-out image of Sleeping Ariadne (the reproduction of the Hellenistic sculpture is reversed with respect to the original). Situated on the surface of the sound board, one atop the other, are a printer’s proof rolled up as though it were a scroll, a silvered frame, and a reversed semicircular canvas, as well as an art folder and several sheets of drawing paper. Four white sheets of paper are freely placed on the “keyboard”, along with, in a central position, a foolscap folio, on which two ochre-coloured cards serve as an open folder holding a sample of twelve coloured cards, arranged in careful succession (the first sheet, which is entirely visible, is golden) and held down by a centimeter ruler. Not far from the keyboard is a chair, while another chair is overturned on the floor in between the chairs supporting the piano (there are other white sheets of paper scattered about on the floor and on the overturned chair). A lit spotlight, clipped on to the shaped panel, illuminates the objects on the sound board.
The figure of Ariadne – in Greek mythology abandoned by her lover Theseus while she was asleep – suggests the “metaphysical” intonation of this silent “piano”: the objects the artist uses to work with have been “abandoned” to themselves, their voices are silent (the frame is empty, the art folder is closed, the sheets are blank, the printer’s proof is rolled up). The pianist seems to have rushed from the scene, leaving behind his empty chair. And it is precisely this absence that emphasizes the “requiem”; the author has moved away from the role he has been assigned – relinquishing his “authorial nature” – to leave the field to the work, the only protagonist, so that it can reveal itself to the gaze that in the distance and in silence awaits it. The “exiled” author simply ascertains his estrangement to the making of the work.
In the artist’s own words: the title, “literally, is the recollection of something that is no longer there, but in this case it is something that isn’t there yet or that can never be there... something we do not succeed in touching".1 Something that remains suspended between the no longer and the not as yet, in the silence of mute echoes and ineffable resonance.

1 G. Paolini in conversation with P.G. Castagnoli, Galleria dell’Oca, Rome, 25 November 2004, published in “Giulio Paolini. Le cose, materia di disegno”, edited by M. D’Alessandro and L. Laureati, in disegno industriale 13 (Rome), 2005, p. 98.