Innumerevole, 2017-21
GPE-0151
Innumerable
Offset lithograph
64 x 44 cm
Signed on the recto, bottom centre: “Giulio Paolini”
No numbering
2500 unnumbered copies
Umberto Allemandi & Co., Turin
Grafica Sette Srl and Seven Media, Bagnolo Mella (Brescia)
The print was commissioned from the artist by the Turin publisher Umberto Allemandi for the annual homage, in 2022, to subscribers to the monthly art journal Il Giornale dell’Arte. The artists involved in previous years were Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, Vanessa Beecroft, and Shirin Neshat.
The white square against a black background contains Berthel Thorvaldsen's Ganymede associated with a photographic glimpse of a blue sky, against which a burst of small, colourful squares stands out.
The iconography joins the images of two pre-existing works on paper – Senza titolo, 2017 (GPC-1604) and Quadricromia, 2020 (GPC-0992) – so that the young man kneeling observes the polychrome dispersion as though it were fireworks or some magical game. Along with the partial view of the sky and the figure of Ganymede – according to Greek mythology a young man of rare beauty – the multicoloured vortex recalls the ideal dimension towards which the author always directs his gaze anew, even though he is aware of the fact that it is impossible to fix the incommensurable and the "innumerable" in a definitive image (as suggested by the tearing and the dispersion).
Bertel Thorvaldsen, Ganymedes med Jupiters ørn, 1817, marble, 93.3 x 118.3 cm, Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen.
| • | Il Giornale dell’arte 38, no. 422 (Turin), November, 2021, col. repr. on cover. |
