Il modello in persona, 2020

Resting on two easels placed opposite each other and slightly staggered are a photographic view of the artist's studio, and a plexiglas sheet, respectively. Furthermore, the latter easel generates a vis-à-vis with the one located at the centre of the photograph.1 Between the two real easels, standing on a transparent base doubling the one that is visible in the photograph is a plaster cast of Vincenzo Gemito's Narcissus (1885) holding a globe in its right hand. Narcissus is seen here in the role of the model "itself", posing for the presumed painting, which is still unknown, represented by the plexiglas sheet on the easel before the cast.
At the centre of this mise-en-scène is the representation as such: the very moment when a work is about to take shape. The artist's studio, the place par excellence where a work can come into being, transposed within the exhibition space brings these two places together: indeed, for Paolini the studio as well as the exhibition space are dedicated to announcing and hosting the manifestation of a representation. An event that by virtue of its nature is based on illusion, as is recalled by the theatricality of the mise-en-scène that through the photograph and the vis-à-vis of the easels joins the ambiguity of the spatial planes, the reflection, and the trompe l’œil in a game of optical tricks.
The mythological figure of Narcissus, known for his beauty and his tragic destiny, along with the globe, which symbolizes the ideal Everything, represent not just the model "itself” – a complete corporeal presence – but also the personification of that ideality, of that original and lost model that the artist pursues in his work via echoes and mirages of all kinds.

1 Propped up on the easel in the artist's studio is the engraving William Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse (1764), in which the author is intent on representing the Comic Muse, while at the foot of the easel is a copy of the treatise on beauty by Hogarth himself.