ART-PRESENTATION: Giulio Paolini

“Then the revelation occurred. Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world. […]” Jorge Luis Borges, “Una rosa amarilla” (A Yellow Rose), (Buenos Aires, 1960),

By Vassiliki Liakopoulou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive

With this passage of Jorge Luis Borges’ text   “Una rosa amarilla”, Marian Goodman Gallery enter us , mentally and physically,  into the latest work of Giulio Paolini. This exhibition brings together a set of mural works, three-dimensional installations and limited editions, expressing the consistently existential question of artist : “To Be or Not to be?”, or with other words his aesthetic and ideas about art and its representation , the figure of the artist and the interchangeable roles of artist and spectator , the gaze of beholder. This issue of   “the role or non-role”  of  the artist  is expressed by an almost unchanging variation of materials (photographs, plaster casts, drawing paper, Plexiglas, objects), which assembled constitute a visual narrative with many references not only to art history or  literature , but also to mathematics and mythology . In the exhibition synopsis Paolini notes: “A single figure, in formal attire, takes on three different roles. At first he is intent upon observing the back of a painting, which reveals to him the “truth” of what is hidden from sight: A Yellow Rose takes possession of his visual field and excludes any other view. The same figure then finds himself exhibiting a ‘game’ of surfaces that allow him to hide his own image via the simulation of geometric and linear motifs. He eventually falls straight down into the void, to the intersecting diagonal lines that determine the Disegno geometrico of his “free fall”. With these exhibits Giulio Paolini succeed to convey his conception  of the figure of the artist not as an autonomous and original individual, but as the everlasting and impersonal interpreter of the same unchanging role: an irreplaceable and yet  invisible subject and consequently his oscillating poetics between presence and absence. Whereas on the gallery’s lower floor, where we are led through a carefully planned mis-en-scène, the artist mention : ”Two other figures inhabit the exhibition space. Two naked bodies, one of which has fallen to the ground, the other stretching upwards, both suspended in a dizzying flight (the void), are actors whose task is to personify the parallel destinies of two characters: Icarus and Ganymede, the end and the beginning of an idea of Beauty, of the same nameless figure”. These exhibits  allow the spectator to travel in Time and History  – two primordial significations of his artistic work–  and  capture Paolini’s ability to convert the aesthetic to ecstatic.

Info: Galerie Marian Goodman, 79 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 15/03-11/5/2019, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11 :00-19 :00, www.mariangoodman.com