Eco e Narciso, 1977-78
GPO-0376
Echo and Narcissus
Pencil and red pencil on primed canvas
180 x 240 cm (two parts 180 x 120 cm each)
Signed, titled, and dated on the verso of the second canvas, central stretcher bar: “Giulio Paolini Eco e Narciso 1977-78”
Trisorio Collection, Naples
The drawing made on the two canvases placed close together overlaps the profile of two previous works by the artist, entitled Eco (1976, GPO-0341) and Narciso (1966, GPO-0095), and the silhouettes of Echo and Narcissus represented by Nicolas Poussin in his homonymous painting (Echo et Narcisse, ca. 1630).
Placed up against Narcissus, Echo listens to Echo's "echo", while Narcissus reclines on Narcissus' "mirror". The diagonals traced in red pencil, which touch the vertices of Narcissus, recall the squaring of Disegno geometrico (1960, GPO-0001), the ideal painting that in Paolini's poetics at a conceptual level underlies all the paintings imaginable.
Nicolas Poussin, Écho et Narcisse, c. 1630, oil on canvas, 74 x 100 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
| 1978 | Naples, Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes, Giulio Paolini, from 9 February, no catalogue. |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 376 p. 381, col. repr. |
