Autoritratto come marionetta, 1994
GPO-0730
Self-Portrait as a Puppet
Velvet stage curtain, stretchers, globe, rolled up primed canvas
Dismantled work
Two stretchers of different sizes hanging from the ceiling – the smaller one hangs from the middle crossbar of the larger one – hold a globe wrapped in a roll of primed canvas, thus forming, at the viewer's eye level, a blind telescope. A small red curtain with golden fringes, which, knotted to the cross-piece of the larger stretcher drops to the ground, recalls the cloak of the "marionette" in the title.
The author caught in the "effort to fix the world" – as the canvas wrapped around the globe suggests – risks a "desperate undertaking",1 and the possibility of remaining caught between sky and Earth, a prisoner of his own ambitions and allusions.
The same title was given to two other "self-portraits", made in 1992 (GPO-0692) and in 1996 (GPO-0730), respectively.
1 G. Paolini interviewed by M. Disch, in Giulio Paolini. La voce del pittore – Scritti e interviste 1965-1995 (Lugano: ADV Publishing House, 1995), p. 300.
| 1994 | Genoa, Galleria Locus Solus, Giulio Paolini. Locus Solus, from 29 April, cited in the checklist of exhibited works no. G5 p. 75, col. repr. p. 63. |
| • | G. Paolini in the interview with M. Disch (1995), in Giulio Paolini. La voce del pittore – Scritti e interviste 1965-1995, edited by M. Disch (Lugano: ADV Publishing House, 1995), pp. 299-300. |
| • | Kounellis, Paladino, Paolini, Bianchi, exhibition catalogue, [Rome], Associazione Culturale Dogana, [1996], col. repr. n. pag. (detail). |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 2 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 730 p. 744, col. repr. (exhibition view Genoa 1994). |
| • | T. Migliore, “Ritratti ‘portratti’. Giulio Paolini e l’identikit dell’artista”, in L’immagine che siamo. Ritratto e soggettività nell’estetica contemporanea, edited by M.G. Di Monte, M. Di Monte and H. de Riedmatten (Rome: Carocci editore, 2014), p. 129, not repr. |
| • | Giulio Paolini. A come Accademia, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2023), col. repr. p. 217 (exhibition view Genoa 1994). |
