Tableau vivant, 1985

A photographic canvas, which overprints various negative images of the artist's previous exhibitions, is placed on top of a man's ceremonial outfit, messily arranged atop the plinth so that it drops down along the sides.
Whereas, like in various works from the early 1980s, the costume refers to the author – who has exited the scene to await the start of the performance in the seating area – the undecipherable clues on the canvas express the echo of previous “missed appointments” with the presumed manifestation of a vision, in the here-and-now of the exhibition.
In the words of the artist, the title – which notoriously designates a type of scenic representation in which one or more actors, immobile and silent, like in a ‘tableau vivant’, recreate a scene or a famous image – "underlies a paradox, since the work does not stage any representation "from life", but, on the contrary, thanks to the abandoned costume and the indistinct traces on the canvas, alludes to something that is no longer visible or may even have been forgotten".1
The work is part of a series of three variants from the same year, which are distinguished by the photo stills reproduced on the canvas and by the way the components were mounted with respect to the plinth (GPO-0544, GPO-0552, GPO-0558).

1 G. Paolini in conversation with M. Disch (2004), in M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 2 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 544 p. 554.