Un’opera aperta (4), 2019
GPO-1083
An Open Work (4)
Bound book with blank pages, photo print, plexiglas case, white plinth
Book 32.5 x 25.5 x 3.5 cm, photo print 32 x 24.5 cm, plexiglas case 20 x 41.5 x 59 cm, plinth 80 x 41.5 x 59 cm, overall dimensions 100 x 41.5 x 59 cm
Titled, signed, and dated on the last page of the book: “Un’opera aperta (4) / Giulio Paolini / 2019”
Collection of the artist
Inserted in a bound book with blank pages that is open at the title-page is a photograph of four closed books, piled one atop the other so that they are staggered.
As suggested by the title, the book remains “open”: not only in a literal sense (the book is installed in an open position), but in a more general sense, with an ironic allusion to the concept of the “open work” elaborated by Umberto Eco in a 1962 essay. The book with blank pages communicates nothing other than an image of itself: between the nothing of the blank pages, the silence of the photographs, and the tautological reference, all the rest remains open: unsaid, mute, enigmatic.
As indicated by the numbering in the title, the work represents the fourth version of a theme developed in four variants (GPO-1080, GPO-1081, GPO-1082, GPO-1083), distinguished by their progressive numbering and the way the volumes are reproduced in the photograph (one volume in the first version, two in the second, three in the third, and four in the fourth).
