Ebla, 1976-77

The title “Ebla”, borrowed from the name of an ancient city (destroyed midway through the second millennium BC and located in the territory of present-day Syria) marks a series of works made between 1977 and 1978 in sixteen [?] variations, divided into two groups with different formats: twelve [?] works measuring 99 x 89 cm each (from GPO-0355 to GPO-0366) and four measuring 140 x 127 cm each (from GPO-0390 to GPO-0393). The technique used – a collage on a wooden panel that the artist had painted so that it resembled marble – is always the same, while the colour of the marbling, the arrangement and the iconography of the fragments of the reproductions of ancient marble artefacts vary. The traces that peer out indistinctly between the faux veining are, in the words of the artist, meant to be "the pre-existing soul in the material destined to reveal itself as a work of art".1
In this version applied to the four corners of a green-blue marbleized panel are the torn fragments from a colour reproduction of the marble decorations of two of the rooms in the Galleria Borghese, Rome (three other small fragments are scattered in the more central part). At the centre is a detail from Gian Lorenzo Bernini's David also on display in the Galleria Borghese.

1 G. Paolini in conversation with M. Disch (2001), in M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 355 p. 365.