Cahiers d’art, 1994

The nine framed elements feature different iconographic variations on the motif of the blank sheet, as if they were the pages of a drawing album or a notebook, evoked by the French expression in the title.
Five elements feature a blank square on a variable background,1 at times with a drawing of other squares made on the passepartout; a sixth element features a black square in the centre. The remaining three elements feature the following, respectively: an empty white passepartout with a drawing of tilted squares; a black passepartout with a blank sheet featuring a pencil drawing that alludes to a sheet in a tilted position; a black passepartout from which the printed image of a blank sheet that was previously folded is visible.2
The installation of the nine framed elements, which vary depending on the exhibition, calls for the arrangement of the components at different levels, including the floor, eventually integrated with other drawings and/or blank sheets.

1 This is the basic iconography of the three plates of the print edition Cahiers d’art made in 1974 (GPE-0014), cat. no. 14, which include the following: 1) a blank sheet applied to the centre of the photograph of an open book reproducing an exhibition space, as it if were a painting hanging on the wall; 2) a larger blank sheet, which almost entirely covers the image of the book and features at the centre a square drawn in pencil; 3) a blank sheet that hides the entire photograph and presents, in the form of a drawing, the situation of the first plate. The image from the book reproduces the double-page spread of the exhibition catalogue Teatro delle mostre (Rome: Lerici Editore, 1968), with the exhibition view of Paolini's work on display at that event. The title refers to the name of the Paris magazine founded in 1926 by Christian Zervos, as well as to the homonymous publishing house, known for its many monographic texts on modern French artists.
2 It is a detail from the print edition Œuvres complètes, 1993 (GPE-0093).