Giulio Paolini "Carte Segrete" (Secret Papers)
Venue: Via della Mercede 12/a Rome, main stairway, 3rd floor
Duration: 6th Nov. 2004 to 10th Jan. 2005
Open hours: Monday to Friday 10:00 - 13:00, 16:30 - 19:30
Saturday viewings possible on appointment
Giulio Paolini's new exhibition, titled
"Carte Segrete" , will open at La Galleria dell' Oca on the 6th of November.
The exhibition, purposely conceived by the artist, will hold thirteen works, arranged in the four rooms of L'Oca's Via della Mercede venue in Rome.
L'Oca has already held, over the years, three exhibitions of works by Paolini, one of the most internationally acclaimed among Italy's contemporary artists, and a seminal figure in the Arte Povera movement that originated in Turin, within which he distinguished himself by a markedly conceptual approach. His first exhibition at L'Oca,
Opere grafiche (graphic Works) was held in 1968.
Subsequently
Le Tre Grazie (The Three Graces) was held in 1979, and a joint exhibition with Jannis Kounellis,
Metafore (Metaphores), in 1991.
We have chosen to publish a letter from our correspondence with the author, as we feel it explains the aims of the exhibition in a lucid and concise manner.
<< ...here are some preliminary notes about the exhibition that we are looking to inaugurate [at the Galleria dell' Oca] in November.
It will be called Carte Segrete (the title is borrowed from the most recent work, which was purposely realized for the occasion) and it will comprise of a further twelve works (all connected to the idea of "papers" but not necessarily papers themselves), from different periods, and thus reunited, retrieved and revised for the occasion (some will be shown at L'Oca for the first time).
A thematic journey, thus, but still open to further explorations.
"The meaning of the exhibition" seems to be one of subtraction: we begin with five works in the first room, followed by four works in the second and three in the third. The fourth and last room will contain only one work...>>.
Works on display
First Room
1 -
--Il nome proprio (First Name), 1986 - 2004
2 -
--Contemplator enim, 1991 - 2004
3 -
--Polvere (Dust), 1994
4 -
--Le chiavi del museo (The Museum's Keys), 2004
5 -
--Identikit (Artist's Impression), 2003
Second Room
6 -
--Voyager (IV), 2004
7 -
--Solitaire, 2004
8 -
--Dentro e fuori (Inside and Out), 1999 2004
9 -
--Off limits, 1999 - 2003
Third Room
10 - Circolo degli artisti (Artist's Club), 1999 - 2004
11 - Carte segrete (Secret Papers), 2004
12 - Notti bianche (Sleepless Nights), 1994
Fourth Room
13 - Requiem, 2003 - 2004
We enclose an unpublished short essay on Giulio Paolini by Caterina Bonvicini, written expressly for the exhibition. It is a portrait of the author, filtered through some of the works that will be exposed.
The perfect chaos
A crystal table top, as bare as a blank paper sheet. Four pencils placed in a row. A ruler and a set ruler, a pair of drawing compasses in the pen holder, two 'thirties writing desks arranged in a L shape, a vintage typewriter. Giulio Paolini - the ground plan of the rooms of the Via della Mercede gallery spread out in front of us invites me to visualize the exhibition he is currently setting up.
It is like being a guest character in one of his writings: it's a journey of the mind, a journey of Cartesian explanations, befuddling in its cross- references.
But could this Paolini I'm interacting with, this Paolini so
Disegno Geometrico, relating facts in an all essential manner as sheer a diagonal line, in his uncluttered study, arranging ideas as if they were mirrors to convey to me the complexity of a project, (at the moment the exhibition only exists on paper, around us are just two white canvasses leaning on the walls in front and behind us, a plexiglas column, three catalogues on the table), could this Paolini so Paolini, I ask myself, be only one of the many possible representations of the author?
He is a discreet and elegant figure, very composed, not at all eccentric. So far, so good. But this could be a superficial reading. So, taking a bit of a gamble, I try something out: I flip him over, exposing the canvas's framework.
Before, though, in order not to betray the literary universe of the artist, in which I willingly chose to roam, I must reveal the groundwork from which I cast my gaze. I am looking at Paolini trough the book that I professionally grew up on: Giuliano Briganti's
I Pittori dell' Immaginario. The exhibition could have taken place anywhere else, but I still would have observed it from this angle. But it didn't take place anywhere. And I'm looking trough my book in the very rooms of Via della Mercede were Briganti once worked. It is a coincidence, but a valuable one: the game becomes even more "paolinian".
Thus, I think of the two faces of the Enlightenment. There is the sunny, geometric side and the side that is nightly and saturnine. And the great fascination that arises from the coexistence of these two aspects. When I try to imagine Giulio Paolini, framework side up, I think of the other eighteen century shore line, the shadow of geometry.
Already on our first meeting, I felt the need to carry out a sort of topsyturvy interview, to ask him not about order, but about chaos, whilst penciling in a little question mark next to this sentence in Calvino's
Idem: "The writer looks at the painter's work, clear and without shadows, only made out of affirmative sentences, and asks himself how he will ever reach such an internal peacefulness."
In some of Paolini's works I saw no trace of any "internal peacefulness" : so I had to find out. Giulio Paolini answered that, as a matter of fact, when Calvino was writing
La Squadratura, in 1975, certain apprehensions had not appeared in his output yet. In those years his approach was based on analysis and scrutiny and ambled along in a flowing and objective manner which was quite shadowless and limpid. Only later, around the Eighties, a certain disequilibrium starts to permeate his work's creative constituents. Today, that answer seems to become ever more indicative. We could not, without it, explain the disquieting aura of a work such as
Requiem.
I do now, however, feel the need to take a step back. To myself re-enter the analytic stage in order to break down a few ideas. And to investigate the nature of this chaos. Because the chaos that Paolini chooses to stage is one of a very particular nature, in that it is abidingly in touch with its antonym.
I would call it a perfect chaos, in the etymological sense of finite, circumscribed, kept in check by its own confines - confines which prove to be absolutely indispensable. We can feel their presence even between different pieces of work, so that to the overdrive of dis-quietness of one work,
Requiem for example, has to necessarily follow a gasp of the oxygen of linearity, which can come under the shape of a slightly later work such as
Carte Segrete , which of course may contain its own small dose of chaos, but within the core of a rigorously transparent geometric structure: as if each of Paolini's work, and the body of his work as a whole, were under the constant scrutiny of a secret, hidden scale. So we have a dialog, harmonious as well as ruthless, between opposites - where the two complementary elements, order and chaos, face each other off whilst searching for a meter of evaluation. With the notable difference that, unlike chaos, order is sometimes allowed to predominate.
Paolini's path is often interspersed with irony and bestride by the clarity of self-analysis, however we can occasionally find a shocking, dramatic rift.
Crumpled sheets of paper desperately thrown around a desk, scattered like a person's incertitudes in the work named
Big Bang. The erasures and doodles that characterize the torn pages of
Giro di Boa.The remains of a letter that Hebe cannot hold between two fingers anymore, a letter that has lost all its functions - it is no mirror, no window, it just lays at the feet of a man who is covering his face with his hands. Collapsed temples (
Selinunte), modern characters being precipitated to the ground (
Voyager), Broken glass for
Passatempo, fragments of an image fleeing its own frame (
Identikit), an optical element that has ceased to be either a telescope or a photographic lens, (which must be evaluated only for what it is), and yet still capable of being the lone spectator of a few grains of dust (
Polvere), until we are presented with what Querini Stampalia called " the unexpected and perhaps uncalled for guest" , the absent body, perhaps of some visitor, whose only tangible traces are the empty clothes and a hat, a visitor who has lost his balance and has fallen head first, among the indifference of the pictures and furniture of a museum (
Capogiro).
An upside down look, so, somehow doubtful in the face of the entanglement of the universe, which as time goes by seems to became less and less measurable.
The Author, rigorously anonymous, seems to split into many figures, as elusive as the arms of a clock, (
Circolo degli Artisti), arranged around a circular idea of time which can still be seen as the one of the
San Sebastiano , but with an extra leap towards a notion of plurality. In the same way, the absence of the abandoned Arianna, (an absence so profound that it stretches far beyond the enclosure of the physical bounds of the work) seems to distend as she leaves behind the round frame of the piano. This is how I look at
Requiem, moved, but not surprised. Maybe, I tell myself, there's a whole story behind it. And I read it as the most touching declaration of this duality, the apex of the conflict between order and chaos.
Requiem is naked, fragile, even emotive (such non paolinian words, still.), it punctures the viewer (it's Barthes's
punctum!) with its harrowing truthfulness, which is nearly unacceptable to a public that loves (or finds reassuring) to see Paolini as very Paolini. To my eyes it is a contradiction that carries its own matchless beauty.
Caterina Bonvicini
Torna in alto
