Le quattro stagioni, 2005

The intervention commissioned from the artist for a room on the ground floor of the Byblos Art Hotel in Verona was inaugurated in September 2005. The work, which is inspired by the several frescoes that are a part of the room’s elaborate decoration, consists of four parts. These call into play two formats, enclosed inside each other and each time alternated and inverted:
1. a blank canvas, suspended before one of the frescoes, is cut out in the central area, thus allowing for a glimpse of the painting behind it. This is also recalled by the frame inserted in the cut-out, which is identical to the frame of the fresco.
2. a drawing carved in the plaster of a walled door represents the outline of an open door and a rectangle (of the same dimensions as the canvas in the previous intervention), inside which a frame hangs on the wall. The frame is the same as the one used in the other episodes;
3. a frame holds a primed canvas at the centre (inverting the situation of the episode situated in front, mentioned here at the beginning);
4. a plexiglas sheet hosts a frame with reflecting plexiglas (according to the proportions of the episode mentioned here at the beginning).
The title alludes to the theme represented in the pre-existing frescoed medallions in the room. In a broad sense, the artist intends the four parts of his intervention as complementary moments that through reciprocal correspondences cause the four seasons of the year to coincide in a single moment: “a game of combinations, aimed at eradicating the episodes that separate the course of Time, the alternation between the different seasons of the year and alluding, at least by images, to an instant of eternity”.1

1 G. Paolini, unpublished note to the work, 2005; manuscript held in the artist’s archive.