Cinque esercizi di stile, 2019
GPE-0141
Five Exercises in Style
Etching and coloured pencils drawing
Hahnemühle 300 g
Five plates 28 x 28 cm each
Signed on the recto of each plate, bottom right: “Giulio Paolini”
Autograph numbering on the recto of each plate, bottom left
35 in Arabic numerals from 1/35 to 35/35
15 in Roman numerals from I/XV to XV/XV
5 ad personam
2 mandatory copies for Italy
1 copy for the Bibliothèque F. Mitterand, Paris
The slight differences in the lines of the coloured drawings from one edition to another are due to the fact that the pastel work on each plate was made by hand.
Edizioni Colophon, Belluno
Roberto Giudici, Varese
The prints were commissioned from the artist by the Edizioni Colophon, Belluno – founded in 1985 and directed by Egidio Fiorin – on the occasion of the publication of the book by Raymond Queneau Exercises in Style.
Raymond Queneau, Cinque esercizi di stile (Belluno-Venice: Edizioni Colophon, 2019). Volume 29 x 29 cm, 28 pages, hardbound, text by the author in French. The book is contained in red full-cloth binding, 30.5 x 30.5 x 3.5 cm, with a string-tie button; the inside boards each feature a pocket. The second pocket holds a trifold soft white folder, 27.5 x 27.5 cm, with the title-page ("Giulio Paolini / Introduzione a / Raymond Queneau / con le / Regole di variazione / di / Marina Giaveri", first side) and colophon (fifth side), which contains the plates and a bi-folio with a text by Marina Giaveri, Regole di variazione, on the theme of variation in literature. Limited edition of 72 copies numbered and signed.
Includes information regarding the number and printing technique of the plates, printer, type of paper, edition size, text by Giaveri, and date of printing (7 March 2019). Numbering bottom centre.
The five plates, framed individually without a passepartout, must be arranged horizontally, at regular intervals whose size depends on the exhibition room.
The five plates each feature a drawing brought to life by a male figure intent on observing a painting. From one plate to the next, the stand-in for the author is different and set in a situation that is also different.1 All the episodes are surrounded by a perimetral square, on which short red lines mark the median axes. Each plate is distinguished by a different original intervention with coloured pencils (rectangles, various lines), that clearly makes visible the gesture of the protagonist, the trajectory of their gaze, the "painting" observed.
Five variants on the same theme, that is, five “exercises in style”, freely inspired by those of the French writer Raymond Queneau, included in the multiple, which reformulate one same episode in a literary style that differs each time.2
1 All the figures are part of the characteristic Paolinian repertoire; some of them date to the 1980s, while others to later decades. Two of them can be found in previous prints, cf. GPE-0097 and GPE-0119.
2 The five texts included in the multiple were chosen by Marina Giaveri from the collection of ninety-nine tales titled Exercises de style (1947).
Figure in tailcoat from Antonio Sandre, Il costume nei tempi (Turin: Scuola Taglio Moderno, 1961), p. 268, fig. 299 (”Da ‘Minister’s Gazette of fashions’, 1925-30”), with the transformation of the original jacket into a tailcoat.
| 2019 | Paris, Librairie Marian Goodman, Giulio Paolini, 15 March - 22 May. |
| • | Vola alta, parola. I libri d’artista delle Edizioni Colophon 2015-2022 (Belluno: Colophonarte, 2022), p. 50 (anonymous entry), col. repr. no. E27 pp. 50-51 (two sheets from edition 19/35 and three sheets from edition 12/35). |
