Primi passi nell’ultima stagione, 2022
GPO-1137
First Steps Towards the Last Season
Pencil, red ink and collage on paper
Nine framed parts 36.5 x 51 cm each, overall dimensions 114.5 x 160 cm
Titled, signed, and dated on the verso of the ninth element, centre: “ “Primi passi / nell’ultima stagione” / Giulio Paolini / 2022”
Private collection, New York
The ensemble of nine framed sheets produces the drawing of a room seen in perspective, with two rectangles on the side walls. At the centre, a figure viewed from behind (the artist himself) observes a blind spot in front of him, marked by the intersection of the diagonals. Hovering at the top is an open envelope with a folded sheet: an unknown message.
The drawing of a room – a recurring motif in Paolini’s work from the mid-1970s onwards – where rectangles, paintings, and frames are confused in a chimerical intersecting of spatial planes, assumes an unprecedented connotation here, suggested by the title. The artist himself is the protagonist, on the threshold of his “last” existential season. “The manner in which the figure treads lightly alludes to the possible steps forward towards a ‘beyond’ that, based on the title, is indicated as an approaching limit”, says the artist. “The envelope foreshadows a message we cannot decipher”1.
1 G. Paolini in conversation with B. Della Casa, 8 April 2022.
Portrait of Giulio Paolini taken by Bettina Della Casa, 2021.
| 2022 | Florence, Museo Novecento, Giulio Paolini. Quando è il presente?, 18 March - 7 September, col. repr. no. 2 pp. 4-5, 132-133, 135 (exhibition views), entry by B. Della Casa and M. Disch p. 111, referred to in the text by B. Della Casa p. 60. |
