En plein air, 1996-97

A plexiglas sheet sits on an easel facing a window overlooking a green area. Carved into the sheet are the diagonals and in a central position a rectangle outlined in black ink. Fixed at the point where the two diagonals intersect is a black pencil. Behind the easel, on the wall to the sides of the window, a drawing shows the sides of the rectangle outlined on the plexiglas sheet in linear projection (the oblique position of the easel with respect to the wall determines a trapezoidal square). The central part of the image literally falls into the void, given that the window interrupts the transcription of the drawing. Arranged on the ground is an overturned canvas propped up against the wall, and a dry branch.
In the painter's mise-en-scène before what is a copy from life, the subject and its representation do not count: the branch and the canvas lie inert on the ground, and the vision is interrupted by the window. The real subject is the point of view before the easel: the pencil at the viewer's eye level corresponds to the eye, and the carved diagonals to the lines of the gaze, which is arrested at the surface of the wall. "In other words – the artist says – extending out from the pencil-point of view are the lines that are at the same time the lines of the gaze, and the diagonals of the painting: the gaze is constituted instantly like the painting, and the outside datum, that is, reality, does not interfere with the primacy of the gaze".1

1 G. Paolini in conversation with M. Disch (2006), in M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 2 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 795 p. 813.