Vivo o morto, 1998-99

Two canvases placed close together, one of which seen from the recto the other from the verso, feature a pencil drawing, divided between the two canvases. The drawing represents a person sitting in an armchair, seen from behind, whose right arm drops down along the outside of the chair while holding a blank sheet of paper. Other sheets of drawing paper are scattered across the surface of the two canvases, as if they had fallen from the figure’s hands. At the centre, in the area corresponding to the point where the diagonals of the painting intersect, a sheet squared in red pencil evokes the squaring of Disegno geometrico (1960, GPO-0001), the artist’s first painting, repeatedly evoked as the conceptual paradigm of his work. The pencil marks in the four corners of the painting suggest the lines of a perspectival construction.
The title refers not so much to the condition of the figure represented, as much as to the fact that the work must ignore whether the author is alive or dead. In the artist’s own words: “not only is the work never ‘his’, not only does it not belong to his biography, but it pre-exists him and will survive when he is gone; indeed, it goes so far as to be indifferent to his date of birth and death”.1 Its existence and its identity to not depend on those of the author, but rather on the elements that announce it, on the squaring and on the traces that make it perceptible as such. In this sense, Vivo o morto reiterates the fundamental concept of Paolinian poetics – formulated starting from Disegno geometrico – according to which there is no link of belonging or dependence between the author and the work.

1 G. Paolini in conversation with M. Disch (2007), in M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 2 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 831 p. 855.