ART CITIES:Milan-Giulio Paolini
Often linked to the Arte Povera movement , Giulio Paolini is best known for an artistic practice that is inscribed in a more strictly conceptual sphere. From the outset of his career, Paolini has developed a complex research centered as much on the artist’s tools as on the figure of the artist as an operator of language and accomplice of the viewer. The main characteristics of his artistic expression include citation, duplication and fragmentation, which are used as expedients for staging the distance between a finished model for making the work a “theatre of evocation”.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Massimo De Carlo Gallery Archive
Giulio Paolini’s solo exhibition “Il Mondo Nuovo” at Massimo De Carlo Gallery presents a new body of work created by the artist for the occasion. The exhibition is part of a two-episode project for which the artist will be working in Milan during 2020; in September Christian Stein Gallery will host “Qui dove sono”. The exhibition’s title, is inspired by the homonymous fresco by the Venetian artist Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804): it represents a crowd of onlookers waiting to light some sort of magic lantern, that projects imaginative images of exotic places inside. As in Tiepolo’s fresco it is the curiosity for the unknown and for a mysterious future, that characterizes the scene, in Paolini’s works that are on display the temporal dimension is the protagonist. The obsession with the passing of time in the artist’s life, in the history of art, or in the succession of hours, runs through all of the artworks. The end wall of the second room hosts “Il Mondo Nuovo” (2020) with a title taken from the homonymous fresco by Tiepolo; 23 collages in golden frames are freely set up around a central, larger, gilded frame that frames a virgin sheet. Each collage shows a fragment taken from the artist’s recent works on paper, inspired by Tiepolo’s fresco. Just as the visitorsof the baroque fresco are not given to know the object of the gaze of the figures represented (the first projections of magic lanterns, exotic dioramas of unknown worlds) so Paolini’s new world is focused and exhausted in the empty central frame, which always renews an expectation of discovery punctually disappointed by the facts. The small room next to the salon hosts “Fuori Tempo” (2020) where, on a plinth, paper elements with different origins and decreasing sizes overlap: a grey card supports an edition of the artist’s work depicting multi-coloured brushstrokes on which, in turn, is laid the photographic reproduction of an empty golden frame. The sheets serve as support surface for an antique palette found among the family mementoes and an empty hourglass in a lying position. Fuori tempo shows a coexistence of elements that are extraneous to each other by their material nature and yet similar in evoking moments from the past and leading us to a temporal dimension that is irremediably outdated.
Giulio Paolini was born in Genoa in 1940. In 1942 his family moves to Bergamo owing to his father’s job. In 1952, the family settles down in Turin. Paolini studies graphic art and he grows familiar with art by visiting exhibitions and galleries. After several attempts at experimentation, in 1960 he makes “Geometric Drawing” a full-fledged statement of intentions; the work will forever remain the charter for all his artistic explorations. His early friendships in the art world lead to the debut of his career, which begins in 1964 with his first solo show at Galleria La Salita in Rome. In the second half of the 1960s, he consolidates his conceptual assumptions and his position of total independence from the effervescent atmosphere that dominates the period. Germano Celant, whom he had met through Carla Lonzi, writes the catalogue essay for his solo show at Galleria del Leone in Venice in 1967, and gets him involved in the nascent Arte Povera scene. Celant invites the artist to participate in the events he curates from 1967 to 1971. In the early 1970s, Paolini forges international ties and holds numerous gallery and museum exhibitions. Declaring his intimate belonging to art history from the outset, Paolini has deliberately stayed inside rooms where art is made, interrogating the very actors of the artistic experience: the author, the viewer, the gaze, the space of the representation. From the analytical studies he performs in the 1960s, Paolini gradually develops toward installations that are formally more complex, and since 2000, he has mainly focused his attention on the act of exhibiting and the artist’s studio. From the start of his career, Paolini has always accompanied his works with notes and writings, collected in several books.
Info: Massimo De Carlo, Piazza Belgioioso 2, Milan, Duration: 15/6-19/9/20, To visit the exhibition please email belgioioso@massimodecarlo.com or call +39 02 70003987 to schedule an appointment, www.massimodecarlo.com
