L’ospite, 1989

A colour photograph mounted on canvas, printed in its negative version and featuring reddish-brown toning, is set down on an easel, which is located at the intersection between the diagonals of a primed canvases lying on the floor. A stretcher leans up against the easel, while a spotlight placed in the corner of the canvas on the ground illuminates the assemblage of elements. The photograph reproduces a situation that was installed by the artist in the atrium of his own home, opposite a door that had been left ajar, with two chairs turned so that one faced the viewer and the other was specular. Standing on the chair to the left was the painting by Angelo Garino Nota intima (1887), while the chair to the left held an oval mirror that reflected the engraving, set down on the floor out of view, that portrayed William Hogarth while painting the Comic Muse.1
The title – used for the first time in 1986 (GPO-0569) – refers to the role attributed by Paolini to the author, the central theme of many of his works from the 1980s. Since in Paolini's universe of thinking the work is an entity offered up to the viewer's gaze in its very making or announcing of itself, the author has no choice but to withdraw in order to reserve the field for the work and its hypothetical becoming. After leaving the scene – as indicated by the door left ajar in the photograph – the author becomes the "guest" of something pre-existing, for which he claims no right except for that of witnessing its possible revelation.
The work is the first in a group of six variants, made between 1989 and 2007 (GPO-0643, GPO-0676, GPO-0708, GPO-0719, GPO-0833, GPO-0958), which are distinguished by the toning, the print in positive or in negative, and the installation of the photograph mounted on canvas, set each time in a scene suggested by its own composition.

1 This is the final state (1764) of the self-portrait entitled William Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse, in which the English artist is intent upon painting the Comic Muse, portrayed while holding the mask of a satyr in one hand and associated with the word "Comedy" etched on the base of the column to the right; Hogarth's own treatise on beauty (The Analysis of Beauty) lies at the foot of the easel. Both Garino's painting and Hogarth's engraving are part of Giulio Paolini's private collection.