Il catalogo è questo, 2020
GPO-1105
This is the Catalogue
Plexiglas tabletop, aluminum trestles, pencil drawings on paper, cardboard case, plexiglas sheets, black pencil
Plexiglas tabletop 160 x 80 cm, two trestles h 80 cm each, overall dimensions 80 x 160 x 75 cm
Collection of the artist
A plexiglas sheet resting on two easels constitutes a table on which various sheets of paper arranged at random and held down by plexiglas sheets of various dimensions seem to have emerged from the slipcase placed at the edge of the table. The drawings feature rectangular motifs organized in different ways: in a row, free, or joined in a regular pattern. At the centre, a black pencil positioned vertically acts as the fulcrum of the whole.
The work-table, which recalls the artist's activity in his studio, stages the becoming of a work: that trajectory towards the definition of an image that has always been at the centre of Paolini's poetics. As the title suggests – a quote from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) – the work we are looking at is a "catalogue" of its own possibilities, a series of conjectures on an identity in progress.
The same theme was formulated for the first time in 2005, in the work entitled Terra di nessuno (GPO-0901).
Title from the opera Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1787, Act I, Scene 5, line 1.
| 2020-21 | Rivoli, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Giulio Paolini. Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, 15 October 2020 - 16 May 2021, vol. 1: cited in the checklist of exhibited works p. 78, col. repr. pp. 32-33, 38-39 (exhibition view), 72 (detail), referred to in the text by M. Beccaria p. 69. |
| • | Giulio Paolini. A come Accademia, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2023), col. repr. p. 293 (exhibition view Rivoli 2020). |
