Da un momento all’altro, 1999

The work was conceived to be placed in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, along the Palazzo Reale-Church of S. Francesco di Paola axis, between the equestrian monuments of Charles and Ferdinand of Bourbon by Antonio Canova.
The four facades of a parallelepiped feature the design of a Neoclassical colonnade – identical to the one in Piazza del Plebiscito – which overlooks a perspectival space, brought to life by one or more figures until it simulates a compact crowd. At the back of the virtual space, a painting that doubles the same space presents a different image each time. The parallelepiped rests on a tall black foundation, topped by three white steps. Hidden inside the steps are neon tubes.
The artist commented on the work as follows: “An endless crowd (the same figure repeated ad infinitum stands motionless and silent around something that we cannot perceive. More than a group of figures scattered here and there, numerous figures form a central perspective, one that is open yet cannot be crossed: absent and composed, like mannequins, they observe the space that they themselves delimit or make visible. That crowd (which all of us are an integral part of, after all) does not look at us, it ignores us and even seems to ignore itself: it is an anonymous and compact barrier that nonetheless introduces us, without allowing us to penetrate it, to the inside of a closed rectangular volume placed in the void of the square.
We who in turn observe await our own role: each of the four sides of the work could suggest one such role to us. We are obviously the original model of the representation: those figures imitate and duplicate in the perspectival fiction our own presence. Included somewhere in that multitude are also, no doubt, the figures of the author and of the spectator, which make up the essence itself of an image that has more than one point of view. However, ultimately, if we do not want to subtract from the work its primary meaning, its true authenticity, all we can do is recognize ourselves, all of us, in the last and unique role that is ours to have: we are the interpreters, the actors of a text that had already been written but that was never represented in its entirety”.1

1 G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. Da un momento all’altro, exhibition catalogue, Naples, Piazza del Plebiscito, 1999, n. pag.