L’arte e lo spazio. Quattro illustrazioni per uno scritto di Martin Heidegger (4), 1983

The work is part of a group of four variants from the same year (from GPO-0494 to GPO-0497), whose common denominator is a bound book of blank pages, open each time in a different position; to one quarter in the first case, halfway in the second, three-quarters of the way in the third, and completely open in the fourth. In the point where the book opens a double-page photographic spread presents an image of the book itself open in that position, with the cast of a hand and plaster fragments scattered in between the pages.1
In analogy with the photographic image, the book is integrated with several pieces of plaster – in the fourth version the cast of a hand is added as well – arranged in between the pages: “as if the process of writing (and reading) produced, page after page, a deposit of material (the text ponders and reflects on sculpture, as the place or eventuality itself of the form): until it confuses, dissolving the two elements, in other words, until it turns the text into sculpture",2 as the artist tells us.
Added to this version is the plaster cast of a hand, placed underneath the book, as if to support it in order to turn it into sculpture.

1 The images reproduce the four plates that make up the print edition titled L’arte e lo spazio [Art and Space], published by Marco Noire in 1983, cf. GPE-0041.
2 G. Paolini in an unpublished and undated note, held in the artist’s archive.