Epidauro (II), 1971

Pinned to the four corners of an empty stretcher, slightly distant from the edges, is a collage of corners torn from various types of images – at the upper left, from a primed canvas, then, clockwise, from a blank sheet of paper, from a sheet of graph paper, and from a sheet of silver paper. These in turn overlap – but so that they are slightly staggered – the torn corners of a photograph of a centimetred line on a blank sheet of paper pinned to a black background.1
The collage frames the empty space of the painting, marking "the temporary limits of a virtual and mutating space",2 comparable to that of a stage, as suggested by the title which alludes to the seat of an ancient Greek theatre.
The same theme was formulated in another version made during the same year (GPO-0213).

1 The photograph of a centimetred line has been a recurring motif in the artist's works on paper since 1965; the version where a black sheet was used has been attested to since 1968 (cf. GPC-0123).
2 G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. Atto unico in tre quadri, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Studio Marconi (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta editore,1979), p. 77.