Noli me tangere, 2022

This work, inspired by Noli me tangere (1438-40) by Beato Angelico, consists of a collage set up on an easel painted white. At the centre of the collage are two specular images of Paolini’s right hand. The distance between the two hands recalls the symbolic one evoked by the hands of Christ and of Mary Magdalene in the fifteenth-century fresco. All around it other reproductions of the artist’s hands and Angelico’s fresco reverberate, amplifying the central nucleus.
In the artist’s own words: “The hands of Christ and Mary Magdalene moving in the void captured my attention as I contemplated the work, to the extent that they arouse wonder in the spontaneous and involuntary movement of my own hands. Hence, the painting set down on the easel seems to be ‘listening’ to the echo that appears to resound in the beauty of that place, in the motionless grace emanating from the space between those hands that do not touch”1.
Broadly speaking, the movement of the hands and the sheets alludes, in the Paolinian universe, to the search for contact with that secret and intangible cipher that distinguishes the work of art, albeit aware of the impossibility of experiencing first-hand that unique and inaccessible dimension.

1 G. Paolini, note to the work, February 2022. The artist is referring to his visit to the cell in the Convent of San Marco where Angelico’s fresco is located. During the visit Sergio Risaliti took pictures of the artist as he moved his hands. Paolini then used one of these photographs to make the work.