Babele, 1989

Standing out against the background of a marine view at sunset, torn and devoid of the part corresponding to the horizon line, is a reproduction of Athanasius Kircher's Colossus at Rhodes at the Entrance to the Port (1679), with the top part missing. In the area corresponding to the sky, the glow of the sunlight seems to have caused the fragmentation of the face, as suggested by some of the details of the exploded image. In the lower part, the gigantic statue is linked to the image of the Egyptian pyramid of Cheops (taken from the same seventeenth-century iconographic source).
The Colossus, situated in the port of Rhodes in the third century BC and akin to the Egyptian pyramid among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, represents Helios, god of the sun. It is also a well-known fact that the sun cannot be stared at, as Paolini himself recalls when he quotes François de La Rochefoucault in a series of works from the same period.1 Each attempt to look at the Sun directly – in Paolini the cosmic sphere and the planets always symbolize the Absolute – involves an inevitable disaggregation. A disorder and a dispersion, as suggested by the title that refers to the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11, 1-9), built with the ambition of touching the sky and punished by God, generating chaos among those who had cultivated such arrogance.
The original collage on which the print is based is documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at number GPC-1680.

1 In the Spring of 1989 the large-scale work Ni le soleil ni la mort... (GPO-0637) was created, along with a series of works on paper with the same title, characterized by a drawn self-portrait with a drawing pin in the left eye (cf. GPC-0752).