Osservatorio, 1988

The print, folded in the middle, features two identical mirror-like photographic views of the Veranda of Villa Pignatelli in Naples, with the work by Paolini titled Caleidoscopio, 1976 (GPO-0323) in conversation with the double row of columns bordering the Veranda towards the garden".1 The mirror-like duplication of the starting image generates a vanishing point, which in the background converges in the intersecting gazes of the two Neoclassical sculptures of Venus.2 The contraposition of the two figures is accentuated by the circular cut-out in the image of the Venus de' Medici situated in the foreground; the cut-out part of the sculpture is dislocated to the left, so that the figure's gaze is oriented towards the other half of itself. The other four rounds, distributed at random on the dual view of the Veranda, reproduce motifs linked to the gaze and to vision.3
The kaleidoscopic game of gazes and columns that are duplicated and reflect each other – inspired by the aforementioned work Caleidoscopio, in which two half columns upside down from each other and placed each on a reflecting plate are mirrored in their own upside-down image – generates a veritable theatre of vision. An observatory, as the title tell us, in which the gaze finds itself observing itself, questioning the phenomenon of vision.
The print corresponds to a large-scale work with the same title, made that same year (GPO-0629).
The original collage on which the print is based is documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at number GPC-0989.

1 The photograph was taken by Paolo Mussat Sartor during Paolini's solo exhibition at Villa Pignatelli in 1978.
2 The nineteenth-century sculpture, permanently on display on the Veranda, which finds itself looking at a copy of itself, recalls Paolini's Mimesi with the cast of the Medici Venus (GPO-0330), represented in the broken up image in the foreground.
3 In this order, from left to right: the scheme of the formation of an image on the retina (taken from a seventeenth-century treatise), the drawing of a figure intent on observing a column (taken from a handbook about drawing or perspective), a late eighteenth-century print depicting the interior of the theatre designed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux for Besançon reflected in the iris of an eye, and to the farthermost right the drawing of an eye and of the visual angle.