Ennesima, 1975-87

From one to the other of the first six sheets, a gradual reticular subdivision prevails over the automatic writing1 – a hypothetical description of the work itself – until it completely replaces the scriptural image and appears as a drawing that as it fills up becomes darker and finally, in the twelfth sheet, achieves a completely black surface.
In the artist's own words: “Hence, three elements: writing, image, time. However, each one of these elements is exhausted in its own nominal enunciation and, all together, cannot be thought of as constitutive. Writing, devoid of communication, does nothing other than preserve its appearance, describe itself. The drawing is the extreme limit of its own legitimacy, the definition of the surface of the page. Time suggests the pattern and dictates, via the succession of the two elements that reveal it, the enigmatic measure of the story: it subtracts further truthfulness from both the writing and the drawing, it regulates their co-penetration in an identity that is continually variable, endlessly multipliable, but whose fate is unchanging. The first page is already the last one, the sequence moves from an equal towards an equal. Here, then, is the neutrality of a dynamic that, again by means of the use of the same elements, only achieves its own infinitesimal development. Indeed, the title Ennesima signifies recalling the possibility of the elevation ad infinitum of this process. As if to say that perhaps establishing the fact that the figurative, visual dimension is born as a pure and simple image is not so obvious, that it does instead have the implicit and intimate need to describe itself, the vocation to find another more definitive form of itself”.2
The theme of Ennesima was conceived in 1972-73 with several works on paper, which originated from the painting Appunti per la descrizione di un quadro datato 1972 (1972, GPO-0238). It was later worked on further in two versions on canvas (1973 and 1975, GPO-0255 and GPO-0297), in a print edition (1975, GPE-0017). This more extensive variant was further reformulated in 1988 in a similar version, made up of twenty-eight elements (GPO-0625).

1 The first six elements correspond to the plates of the homonymous print from 1975, hence the date 1975-87.
2 G. Paolini, in Giulio Paolini. Atto unico in tre quadri, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Studio Marconi (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta editore, 1979), p. 107.