Era finora, 2021

The work consists of two complementary parts, arranged on two opposite walls (referred to as side A and side B). At the far ends of each of the walls are the two halves of a plaster cast of an antique head, each of which set down on a base and facing each other. On side A, the Greek female head represents the classical canon, while on side B the male head evokes the Neoclassical age. On the walls red pencil is used to outline the spot where the two figures’ gaze intersects; the cones of vision embrace a regular sequence of squares drawn in black (six on side A and two on side B), which, in turn, each include an image framed in a plexiglas case. Each case holds the photographic reproduction of an antique landscape or an archaeological site, which acts as a background to a smaller, slightly protruding image representing a figure from the same period (the distance between the two juxtaposed elements alludes to the countless other possible combinations). On side A, the reproductions in the background recall, in chronological succession, places and figures from the Etruscans to the Renaissance, while on side B they provide views and faces from the modern and contemporary ages (the images chosen have no symbolic value, but rather are the details of the history of the images of Western civilization).
Overall, the work underlies a path from antiquity to the present time, from what has been up until now, as the title suggests, towards what is still unknown: in the sequence of squares drawn on the wall, the ones at the far ends of the “frieze” are open, suggesting their limitless continuation. The present – the here and now we find ourselves in – is a moment of suspension between a past that has already been consumed and a future that is as yet unknown. “The work alludes not only to the relativity of the two opposite poles, but also, by extension, to the potential infinity that these same or other possible images have to fulfil the continuity of Beauty, of a story that we certainly cannot contemplate in its entirety, but that we can presume completely”1, the artist says.
Broadly speaking, the gaze that crosses a flow of images is that of the artist who thinks back to a work that is yet to be made, for a continuity with neither a beginning nor an end. For the artist, looking means imagining a work: seeing it in perspective, crossing a historical and temporal dimension, in order to inscribe echoes, memories, visual traces in the space of the representation, determined by the edges of a canvas, a sheet, a wall, or a room, and seen as a universal container of every possible image.

1 G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. Era finora (Milan: Edizioni Fondazione Luigi Rovati and Johan & Levi editore, 2022), p. 45.