Photofinish, 1993-94

The wooden panel placed at the centre of the plexiglas case features thirty-two black and white miniatures of the artist's works, alternated with the same number of empty squares, thus forming the image of a chequerboard. Enclosed inside the base are a small upside-down game table and two chairs, one standing on the table and the other upside down on the chair that is right side up.
In the artist's own words: "Photofinish ended and summed up an eight-part exhibition, which was held from October 1993 to June 1994 at the Galleria Locus Solus in Genoa. On the chequerboard […] are the photographic images of the works gradually exhibited before this one: thirty-two in all, each of them reduced, however, to the dimensions of each 'place' on the chequerboard (4.5 x 4.5 cm), offering an overall and simultaneous image of it".1 In Genoa, after the work was exhibited as a "work in progress" in the entrance space of the gallery for the entire duration of a year-long exhibition, Photofinish constituted the key to interpretation of the whole project. The chequerboard as metaphor for the exhibition stage, which sees the succession of various representations, is at the same time a metaphor for the scenic space of the work of art, on which the artist gets ready to raise the curtain each time. In this sense, the game in question is the challenge that the artist plays first and foremost with himself – at his own work table – in the vain attempt to find the move that will allow him to "make all works into one work": that ideal work which includes all the others and that, from one "place" to another on the chequerboard, which can potentially be extended endlessly, is irremediably destined to become lost in a kaleidoscope of images.

1 G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. Von heute bis gestern / Da oggi a ieri , exhibition catalogue, Graz, Neue Galerie im Landesmuseum Joanneum (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1998), p. 183. As concerns the exhibition project and the individual phases of the exhibition cf. the exhibition catalogue in two volumes Giulio Paolini, Locus Solus (Genoa: Edizioni della Galleria Locus Solus, 1994), as well as Paolini's statement in an interview with F. Pasini, in Flash Art 184 (Milan, Italian edition), May, 1994, in particular pp. 23-24; republished in Giulio Paolini. La voce del pittore – Scritti e interviste 1965-1995 (Lugano: ADV Publishing House, 1995), pp. 277-279.