Terra di nessuno, 2022
GPO-1141
No Man’s Land
Pencil and collage on photographic print applied to a wooden panel inside a plexiglas case, black wooden chess king
41 x 41 x 2.5 cm
Private collection
The work can be installed on a table or another piece of furniture or on a plinth (80 x 50 x 50 cm), protected by a plexiglas case (50 x 50 x 50 cm).
The photograph of the sky divided into 64 units, via a grid outlined in pencil, and the 32 scattered square photographic elements, represent a chessboard, topped at the centre by a black chess king (the details are cut-out images from the artist’s repertoire – a timepiece, autograph writings, partial views of the studio, landscapes, frames – and correspond to the black squares of the chessboard).
Metaphorically speaking, the chessboard – a recurring element in Paolini’s oeuvre since 1975 – alludes to the artist’s work-table and to the game that, from one work to the other, the author plays in his own studio. As the title Terra di nessuno (No Man’s Land) suggests, the condition of planning in which nothing is as yet definite is evoked: a “no man’s land” in which every conjecture remains possible. The sky, intended as the greatest opening possible of the visual field and as an absolute space represents, for Paolini, the ideal horizon line, a dimension that is eternally evoked, but by its very nature is inaccessible.
| 2022 | Florence, Museo Novecento, Giulio Paolini. Quando è il presente?, 18 March - 7 September, col. repr. no. 8 pp. 17 (exhibition view), 18-19 (detail), repr. p. 50 (exhibition view), col. repr. pp. 138-139 (exhibition view), cited in the entry for the work Quando è il presente? by B. Della Casa and M. Disch p. 117, referred to in the texts by B. Della Casa p. 63, S. Zuliani p. 79; the work is installed as part of Quando è il presente?, 2022 (GPO-1138). |
