"When is the present? "Giulio Paolini
Curated by
Bettina Della Casa
and Sergio Risaliti
presented by the gallery :
Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019, United States
Telephone: 212-977-7160 Fax: 212-581-5187 e-mail:
Multiple location : Paris New York Londonl
MUSEO DEL NOVECENTO
Palazzo dell'Arengario Via Marconi, 1 20123 Milano
T. +39 02 884 440 61 F. +39 02 884 440 62 email :
18 March > 7 September, 2022
The title of the exhibition, When is the present?, curated by Bettina Della Casa and Sergio Risaliti, is taken from a letter written in 1922 by Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas Salomè, and constitutes the starting point from which Giulio Paolini traces his own meditation about time and our inability to grasp it, combining questions about the role of art and the figure of the artist with those about existence and its flow. The works on display, at the center of a path conceived by the artist himself, interact with the Renaissance architecture of the rooms on the ground floor of the Museo Novecento, inviting us to take a journey into his latest reflections on the meaning of artistic creation and on the its multiple implications.
With the particular refinement that has always characterized his work, Paolini introduces us to an ‘other’ dimension, touching some of the most hidden and vibrant strings of the human soul. As in an incessant game of mirrors, the observer – with his own baggage of aspirations, fears, passions – is directly called into question by the unfolding of drawings, collages, installations, which redefine space and our ‘pace’ within it.
«Art happens», Paolini usually remembers, quoting Whistler in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. The wonder of art, its unconditional manifestation, ideally unite the artist and the observer, called to participate in an incessant search for meaning, in a game of references often tinged with irony. The works do not convey reflections on news and worldliness, on our troubled society, on the facts and misdeeds of globalization: in them the amazed encounter of the artist with art itself is manifested, a process that is placed in our time but which it is, inevitably, outside it, overcoming every contingency, as belonging to a metaphysical dimension.
Born in Genoa in 1940, Giulio Paolini lives and works in Turin. As soon as he was twenty, he arrived at the definition of a completely original style, as revealed by Geometric Design, a canvas painted in white on which an ink squaring is traced. The work, created in 1960, is considered by the artist himself as a permanent point of reference in his production. In fact, his reflection on the space of representation and the status of the work of art begins to take shape.
Paolini’s works call into question the tools of artistic making, the figure of the author and his relationship with the work and with the observer, in a research that draws nourishment from the history of art itself: from the birth of the Renaissance perspective to the survival of the myth in iconography, to the perpetuation of classical models.
At the end of the sixties he took part in the manifestations of the Arte Povera movement, settling on a position of tendential autonomy. Freeing himself from any conditioning of the dominant culture, in the years of contestation and commitment he became the spokesperson for an art far from social and political claims, dwelling on the enigma of vision, on the elusive relationship between art and object, on the elusive definitions of time and space.
Paolini questions the very value of creation and representation, expressing his own investigation in sophisticated formal and conceptual constructions. The perspective, the theme of the double, the theatricality of the staging characterize his mature production, in which innumerable references of an artistic, literary and philosophical nature are deposited and relived.
As Maddalena Disch recalls: «Among the main characteristics of his operating mode are quotation, duplication and fragmentation, used as expedients to stage the distance from an accomplished model and to make the work a “theater of evocation”. These visual procedures that draw on a vast repertoire of literary, mythological and philosophical references, evoked through photographic reproduction, collage and plaster cast, are complemented by articulated and composite installations, centered on additive dynamics (seriality, repetition, juxtaposition ), centrifugal (explosion and dispersion starting from the center) or centripetal (concentration, overlapping, interlocking)».
Protagonist of important exhibitions in galleries and museums all over the world, since the beginning he has also associated his artistic practice with a literary research, as revealed by the emblematic reflections collected in several books, including Idem (1975), Contemplator enim (1991) , Painting lesson, Black Out and Boa (1992-1998), The truth in four lines and ninety-five voices (1996), Four steps. In the museum without muses (2006), From the Atlas to the Void in alphabetical order (2010) and The author who believed he existed (2012).
With the particular refinement that has always characterized his work, Paolini introduces us to an ‘other’ dimension, touching some of the most hidden and vibrant strings of the human soul. As in an incessant game of mirrors, the observer – with his own baggage of aspirations, fears, passions – is directly called into question by the unfolding of drawings, collages, installations, which redefine space and our ‘pace’ within it.
«Art happens», Paolini usually remembers, quoting Whistler in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. The wonder of art, its unconditional manifestation, ideally unite the artist and the observer, called to participate in an incessant search for meaning, in a game of references often tinged with irony. The works do not convey reflections on news and worldliness, on our troubled society, on the facts and misdeeds of globalization: in them the amazed encounter of the artist with art itself is manifested, a process that is placed in our time but which it is, inevitably, outside it, overcoming every contingency, as belonging to a metaphysical dimension.
Born in Genoa in 1940, Giulio Paolini lives and works in Turin. As soon as he was twenty, he arrived at the definition of a completely original style, as revealed by Geometric Design, a canvas painted in white on which an ink squaring is traced. The work, created in 1960, is considered by the artist himself as a permanent point of reference in his production. In fact, his reflection on the space of representation and the status of the work of art begins to take shape.
Paolini’s works call into question the tools of artistic making, the figure of the author and his relationship with the work and with the observer, in a research that draws nourishment from the history of art itself: from the birth of the Renaissance perspective to the survival of the myth in iconography, to the perpetuation of classical models.
At the end of the sixties he took part in the manifestations of the Arte Povera movement, settling on a position of tendential autonomy. Freeing himself from any conditioning of the dominant culture, in the years of contestation and commitment he became the spokesperson for an art far from social and political claims, dwelling on the enigma of vision, on the elusive relationship between art and object, on the elusive definitions of time and space.
Paolini questions the very value of creation and representation, expressing his own investigation in sophisticated formal and conceptual constructions. The perspective, the theme of the double, the theatricality of the staging characterize his mature production, in which innumerable references of an artistic, literary and philosophical nature are deposited and relived.
As Maddalena Disch recalls: «Among the main characteristics of his operating mode are quotation, duplication and fragmentation, used as expedients to stage the distance from an accomplished model and to make the work a “theater of evocation”. These visual procedures that draw on a vast repertoire of literary, mythological and philosophical references, evoked through photographic reproduction, collage and plaster cast, are complemented by articulated and composite installations, centered on additive dynamics (seriality, repetition, juxtaposition ), centrifugal (explosion and dispersion starting from the center) or centripetal (concentration, overlapping, interlocking)».
Protagonist of important exhibitions in galleries and museums all over the world, since the beginning he has also associated his artistic practice with a literary research, as revealed by the emblematic reflections collected in several books, including Idem (1975), Contemplator enim (1991) , Painting lesson, Black Out and Boa (1992-1998), The truth in four lines and ninety-five voices (1996), Four steps. In the museum without muses (2006), From the Atlas to the Void in alphabetical order (2010) and The author who believed he existed (2012).
 | Giulio Paolini | |
mpefm
ITALY art press release
TIME TABLE :
Thursday CLOSED
Monday-Sunday 11.00-21.00
Last admission one hour before closing the museum.
TICKETS
Full €9,50
Reduced 18-25 years old and university students €4,50
Up to 18 years old, groups of students and their teachers, tour guides and interpreters, disabled people and their carers, ICOM, ICOMOS and ICCROM members
Thursday CLOSED
Monday-Sunday 11.00-21.00
Last admission one hour before closing the museum.
TICKETS
Full €9,50
Reduced 18-25 years old and university students €4,50
Up to 18 years old, groups of students and their teachers, tour guides and interpreters, disabled people and their carers, ICOM, ICOMOS and ICCROM members
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