Pagine (Conté à Paris), 2023
GPO-1149
Pages (Conté à Paris)
Bound book with blank pages, eyeglasses, red ink on paper, torn xerox reproduction, black Conté à Paris pencil, Derwent Drawing white pencil, white plinth, plexiglas case
Book with pencils 45 x 45 x 10 cm, plinth 80 x 50 x 50 cm, case 30 x 50 x 50 cm
Titled, signed, and dated on the first page of the book, centre: “ “Pagine / (Conté à Paris)” / Giulio Paolini / 2023”
Private collection, Brescia
The work must be installed on a white plinth (80 x 50 x 50 cm), protected by a plexiglas case (30 x 50 x 50 cm).
On the square of the double page spread of an open book, a square outlined in red ink frames the torn image, printed in negative, of a perspectival grid. Placed atop the image and at the centre is a pair of eyeglasses, and laid down along the stitching that binds the pages are two pencils: at the top is a Derwent Drawing white pencil with a red-painted body, at the bottom a black Conté à Paris pencil. The two pencils, which slightly overhang the margins of the book, recall the colours of the perimetral square and of the black and white reproduction. The end of the pencil with the red-painted body coincides with the area where the vanishing lines of the drawing converge.
The red square and the perspectival construction frame the space of the representation, while the pencils and the eyeglasses are a reference to the author, who awaits an image to be manifested on the horizon line of the gaze. The open book becomes a "stage" for the mise-en-scène of the materializing of a vision, with the complicity of the pencils and of the artifices of the drawing.
The title pays homage to Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755-1805), the inventor of the modern pencil and the creator of the famous French trademark.
The work is the second formulation of a theme that began in 2022 with a first version with the same title (cf. GPO-1142).
