Silence, 2006

Twenty gilt frames arranged at equidistant intervals constitute a modular pattern that continues in the drawing of rectangles outlined on the wall. In the drawing the pattern features several missing modules; the outer ones are open, suggesting a potential continuity. The central frame, at the viewer’s eye level, encompasses a collage made up of the overlapping of details from the reproduction on acetate of Francis Picabia’s painting Silence (1949), so that the small round shapes represented in the painting coincide and thus produce a swirling central nucleus.1 Scattered on the frames situated all around this epicentre are tiny torn fragments – taken from a reproduction of the planets – reinforcing the idea of a centrifugal explosion.
“A sort of ‘big bang’ or ‘black hole’ with neither place nor date”,2 according to the artist, the central image evokes a primordial cosmic phenomenon that in Paolini’s universe harkens back to the genesis of a work. Similarly, the multitude of frames and rectangles alludes to the potentiality underlying a painting that is being created, which still has no identity, as well as to the quest for the ideal Painting (represented by the gilt frame) pursued with no beginning and no end by the author.

1 The collage dates to 2003 as attested to by its reproduction in Riga 22 (Milan), November, 2003, p. 451.
2 G. Paolini, Quattro passi. Nel museo senza muse (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2006), p. 95.