Non toccare, 1991
GPO-0685
Do Not Touch
Pencil and collage on primed canvas and on wall
Canvas 70 x 70 cm, drawing on wall 120 x 120 cm
Luisa Laureati Briganti Collection, Rome
A primed canvas on which a spatial setting has been drawn is included in the diagonals of the drawing on the wall that frames it, so that the whole recalls the perspectival box of a room. Applied at the centre of the canvas and all around it on the wall are the torn fragments of a drawing in perspective of a room with two doors at the back (cf. to this regard the works made during the same year entitled Contemplator enim, GPO-0681, GPO-0683, GPO-0684).
The title refers to the intangibility of the dimension of the representation and to the distance separating the author and the viewer of the work, which is the unknown that "it is no use touching and trying to understand"1, as the artist tells us. The only tangible reality is the device that announces it, the scaffolding that provokes the wait.
1 G. Paolini interviewed by M. Bourel, in Art Press 164 (Paris), December, 1991, p. 19.
| 1991 | Rome, Galleria dell’Oca, Metafore. Gianni Kounellis e Giulio Paolini, 28 May • 31 October, not repr. |
| • | G. Paolini in the interview with M. Bourel, “Giulio Paolini, contemplateur donc”, in Art Press 164 (Paris), December, 1991, p. 19; republished in Italian in Giulio Paolini. La voce del pittore – Scritti e interviste 1965-1995, edited by M. Disch (Lugano: ADV Publishing House, 1995), p. 260. |
| • | Giulio Paolini. Von heute bis gestern / Da oggi a ieri, exhibition catalogue, Graz, Neue Galerie im Landesmuseum Joanneum (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1998), col. repr. p. 302. |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 2 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 685 p. 699, col. repr. |
