Progetto per il giardino della Münchener Rückversicherungs-Gesellschaft, Monaco di Baviera, 2000

In May 2000, the Rückversicherung insurance company invited Paolini to take part in a competition that involved adding a work of contemporary art to the garden at its Munich headquarters.
The project, which was never realized, involved the idea of arranging in a circle a close group of life-size figures imagined as silhouettes made of varnished metal or synthetic resin. The figures seem to be watching a mysterious luminous phenomenon, provoked by a circular mirror situated at the centre, yet hidden from sight (the mirror is slightly lower with respect to the ground level). The surface reflects and diffuses the natural light falling from above, or, as an alternative, the source of artificial light coming from below.
“A compact crowd (the same figure repeated several times) is quite still and silent around something that we cannot see. Rather than a group of huddled figures, numerous characters form a sort of unsurpassable barrier: detached and serious, akin to mannequins, they observe the space that they themselves outline on the ground. That crowd (of which all of us are an integral part after all) does not look at us, it ignores us and even seems to ignore itself. We who, in turn observe, await to take our role: those characters imitate and duplicate our own presence”,1 writes the artist in his comment to the project.

1 G. Paolini, unpublished note to the project, 2000, typescript held in the artist’s archive. The text refers to the comment to the work Da un momento all’altro (GPO-0837), made the previous year for Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples.