Voyager (V), 1989-23
GPO-1156
Portable drafting machine, xerox reproductions applied to sheets of white paper
Seven sheets of paper 30 × 42 cm each, overall dimensions variable
Collection of the artist
2023, Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca: six images reproduce views and details of the Accademia’s Salone d’onore; the second image from the top illustrates a view of the eighteenth-century painting gallery of the Galleria Corsini, Rome.
The portable drafting machine holds several photographic reproductions of the Salone d’onore in the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, for which the work was made. The images that fall freely – each of them applied to a larger blank sheet of paper – depict details of the coffered ceiling, some of the paintings on display on the walls, and partial views of the Salone.
In an analogy with the spaceship evoked in the title and by way of the mechanical and measurement elements of the drafting machine in an open position, it is as if the work were rather like a foreign body drifting in space, reflecting and analysing it.
In the artist's own words: “The somewhat old-fashioned instrument known as a drafting machine was, or might still be, a device used to design something unprecedented, new, and to transfer it from ideas to paper. But what actually happens? The drafting machine undergoes a U-turn: from the planning phase it becomes the springboard for a dive into what exists all around it. Rather than demonstrating the lines of a design, the drafting machine lets the sheets fall, it causes them to fall, forgetting to offer something brand new, and limiting itself to capturing moments, snapshots of the space around it".1
The work continues to develop a theme that was initiated in 1989 and was returned to in 1995 and in 2004 (GPO-0647, GPO-0651, GPO-0762, GPO-0895). All of the previous versions include several elements arranged on the floor, which converse with the ones suspended above.
1 G. Paolini interviewed by G. dalla Chiesa, in art a part of cult(ure), online journal, 23 May 2023.
Views of the Salone d’onore, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome, taken by Bettina Della Casa, 2023.
| 2023 | Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Giulio Paolini. A come Accademia, 20 April - 15 July, cited in the checklist of exhibited works p. 304, col. repr. pp. 62-63 (exhibition view), referred to in texts by A. Soldaini pp. 39-41, F. Guzzetti p. 70. |
| • | G. Paolini, “A come Accademia”, in Giulio Paolini. A come Accademia, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2023), p. 22. |
| • | G. Paolini in the interview with A. Soldaini, “In dialogo”, ibid., p. 100. |
| • | G. Paolini in the interview with G. dalla Chiesa, “Giulio Paolini. Una conversazione”, in art a part of cult(ure), online journal, 23 May 2023. |
| • | E. Lucchese, “Viandanti dell’arte contemporanea in Italia: De Chirico, Savinio, Nathan, Paolini”, in Visitors. Per una storia iconografica del viaggiatore, del visitatore e del turista, edited by G. Brevetti (Naples: Luciano Editore, 2025), p. 152, not repr. |
