A come Accademia, 2009-10

Four plexiglas supports, suspended at different heights between the ceiling and the floor, hold the torn parts of a photographic enlargement of Titian's Sisyphus (1548-49) along with several pieces of drawing paper. In their ruinous vertical trajectory, the images intercept an easel that, along with a second folding easel, holds two large plexiglas sheets that overlap to create a horizontal plane. On this work surface, six plaster columns delimit an ensemble of photographic reproductions and drawings – on paper or on acetate – arranged at random between the two transparent sheets: projects, studies, eyes, hands, and others images coming from the artist's repertoire, some of which squared with red ink along the diagonals. Also located on the first easel is a plexiglas sheet that serves as a “backdrop”, recalling, in a broad sense, a painting that is still unknown.
The figure of Sisyphus, who, through the motif of the fall recalls another mythological character, Icarus, who fell into the sea, metaphorically suggests the artist's inevitable fate: even though he is aware of the impossibility of bringing the creation to fruition, he does not forgo constantly renewing his task. The work materials scattered across the table and symbolically inscribed in the architecture of a temple – alluded to by the columns – are the clues of a work that is becoming, clues that refer to the context of the design and the reflection on art: the artist's studio, as well as the room of a fine arts academy (the work was conceived for an exhibition at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Brera, which also inspired the title of the work).
In 2023, on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, Paolini made several variants to the installation of the elements on the horizontal plane with respect to the first presentation in Milan in 2010. In particular, he omitted the site plan on acetate of the Salone Napoleonico – placed on the ensemble of paper elements in Milan – in favour of a work he made as a young man, titled Detail of Atlantis (1958), inspired by the legendary sunken island of Atlantis and meant as the echo of an unattainable destination. The small tempera on cardboard is placed in between two transparent plexiglas sheets the same size as Disegno geometrico, the painting that was made two years later, in 1960, and that has since become the conceptual model of Paolini's poetics. “The choice is based on my desire to show something that preceded the future absoluteness of Disegno geometrico”,1 says the artist to this regard, emphasizing the condition of anteriority, expectation, and research, with respect to the finished dimension of a defined work.
The same title was used for two other works, made in 2023 on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, also titled A come Accademia (cf. GPO-1053, GPO-1054).

1 G. Paolini interviewed by A. Soldaini, “In dialogo”, in Giulio Paolini. A come Accademia, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2023), pp. 98-99.