Quando è il presente?, 2022

The composite ensemble of objects and materials is inspired by the painting titled Nota intima (1887) by Angelo Garino, from the artist’s collection, depicting a painter painting in his studio.
The period armchair, owned by the artist and placed before the nineteenth-century painting, recalls the chair occupied by the painter, while the partially unrolled carpet on the floor mirrors the one in the painting. A gilt frame and a primed canvas, set down on the floor up close to the easel, recall the antique frame and other paintings represented in Garino’s work. The long drapery, part of which lies on the painting, while another part drops to the floor, features a blown-up image of Paolini’s studio, amplifying the context of the artist’s atelier.
On the black cardboard surface next to the armchair is a chessboard consisting of a photograph of the sky divided into 64 units, on which are scattered 32 square photographic details cut out from images from Paolini’s repertoire. In a metaphorical key, the chessboard, topped in the middle by the black chess king, alludes to the artist’s work table and to the game that from one work to another the artist plays in his own studio. For the artist the sky represents an ideal dimension, eternally invoked, but that is inaccessible by its very nature.
On the armchair, an open book with blank pages contains, to the right, the photograph of a pair of glasses set down on the double page of an open book, which in turn features an outline in red and black ink of the image of a book and two rectangles that mirror each other. On the photograph is a black Conté à Paris pencil. The armchair, the eyeglasses, the pencil, the blank pages are the clues of the artist, who has left the scene to assume a contemplative and thoughtful position: to question his own identity as an artist, his own relationship with the work within the context of his studio, understood as the place par excellence of the manifestation of a work of art.
The questions about the figure of the artist and about the sphere of art resound, with existential value, in the title, taken from a 1922 letter sent by the Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé. For Paolini, the question “When Is the Present?” ponders both the eternal present in art, by definition extraneous to a diachronic time, and art’s inexorable occurrence, forever suspended between memories of the past and apparitions still unknown. For the artist on the threshold of his final season, Rilke’s question joins the reflection on the unstoppable passing of existence – the chess game as a duel with Time – and on the difficulty of capturing the essence of things in the present.