Giulio Paolini - ITALIA Theme Sale London Tuesday, June 29, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galleria Notizie, Turin; Private Collection, Rome; Private Collection, Milan

  • Exhibited

    New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Recent European Painting, 20 May–8 September 1993 

  • Literature

    M. Disch, Giulio Paolini, Catalogo ragionato 1960–1999, Milan, 2008, no. 394 p. 400 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    The work of Giulio Paolini is characterized by a constant interplay between various art historical discourses and references. Using conventional painter’s materials and technique, he breaks down the process of art making into fragments, often placing the viewer in the role of subject and author. He constantly emphasizes the material aspects that are involved in the means of representation whilst questioning and inverting the roles of the viewer and artist. The viewer plays an essential role when faced with a work by Paolini, as it is the viewer who is instrumental in projecting meaning and his knowledge of the image onto the work. 
    Paolini admits his fascination with the image and its significance to the viewer:  “I was never able to renounce the mystery and also the sensuality that the image always involves. In this sense, even if there has been a certain process which over the last twenty years has achieved its own coherence in my work. I have never tried a priori for this consistency. But I have always, little by little, I would say, picture by picture, searched for the immagine, the absolute image, with careful control. This has placed me in a conceptual realm … My expression is internalized and less explicit…” (from an interview with Susan Taylor in C. Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, London, 2005, p. 258). Paolini’s work is charged with references to, and reverence for the works of the Old Masters, such as Lorenzo Lotto, Raphael, Ingres and Velásquez. In the present lot, an installation from 1978 entitled Parnaso (Parnassus), Paolini pays homage to the painting of the same title by Andrea Mantegna, now in the Louvre, which was painted in 1496–97 to commemorate the wedding of Isabella d’Este to Francesco II. The subject matter is a celebration of the love affair between Mars and Venus. The couple are depicted at the top of Mount Parnassus where they are serenaded by the Muses (in the centre foreground) and Apollo (playing a lyre at the left of the scene), and watched by Pegasus and Mercury (at the right of the picture). By giving the work the same title as the painting by Mantegna, and by arranging the elements so as to present a schematic, even symbolic, version of the original (for example, by placing flowers where the Muses are in the earlier painting, or by including blank canvases for the figures at right and left), Paolini not only deliberately recalls the image but requires of the viewer to do the same. In this way, Paolini disassociates himself as the originator and instead puts the viewer in the position of the artist. “The painter returns to the canvas from which he started out, the geometrical squaring placed in brackets, the picture which contains all the pictures. Painting is a totality to which nothing can be added while at the same time being a potentiality which implies everything paintable. The photographs of this squared canvas will be able to fill the catalogue of an imaginary picture gallery, repeated in their sameness with, each time, the name of an invented painter and with the titles of possible or impossible pictures which you only have to sharpen your eyes to see…” (Italo Calvino quoted in C. Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, London, 2005, p. 261)

16

Parnaso

1978
Pencil and needles on prepared canvas and artificial flowers.
Central canvas: 40 × 60 cm (15 3/4 × 23 5/8 in); overall: 140 × 210 cm (55 × 82 5/8 in).

Estimate
£150,000 - 200,000 

ITALIA Theme Sale

30 June 2010
London