Il catalogo è questo, 1998

The work conceived as part of a series of exhibitions that on each occasion invited an artist to create a work for the foyer of the Teatro Regio in Turin, in association with the theater’s calendar of events, accompanied the performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, on which its title and theme are based. At a later time, it was also exhibited in the foyer of the De Koninklijke Schouwburg theatre in The Hague, as part of a project commissioned from the artist.
The photographic passepartout constituted by the rotation of the same detail of a curtain frames a collage applied to the wall, which offers the same cut-out figure of L’Indifférent by Jean-Antoine Watteau eight times, either standing or upside down, against a background of small silver-gilded or gilded stars and spheres.
In the artist’s own words: “Don Giovanni ‘recited’ by L’Indifférent: the character, having emerged from Watteau’s small painting, is repeated 8 (eight = infinity) times and is arranged in a circle to designate a figure, an acrobatic frieze that revolves above in the night-time sky framed by the golden fringes of a curtain that is also a frame. The echo of a reciting voice, of an endless monologue … Il catalogo è questo (This is the catalogue).1

1 G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. Da oggi a ieri, exhibition catalogue, Turin, GAM Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Turin: Hopefulmonster, 1999), p. 69.