Finis terrae, 2023

Applied to the sheet of paper, with a fold in the middle, is the reproduction of an architectural drawing borrowed from a seventeenth-century handbook on perspective.1 The red rectangle emphasizes the linear layout directed towards the vanishing point at the centre of the image. Some of the lines of the perspectival construction continue in red all around the image in the manner of wheel spokes, while a rectangle made in pencil circumscribes the seventeenth-century drawing, echoing the internal rectangle. Visible in the foreground is the image of Antonio Canova's Danzatrice con i cembali (Dancer with Cymbals) (1812), applied by collage; although the figure is turned towards the horizon line, it seems to shirk from the intensity of the vision, as indicated by the head bent rightwards and the bent arm.
The theme of the perspective recalls the notes the artist wrote for the book that is accompanied by the print, which clarify the reasons for the use of this expedient that is so essential to his work. For Paolini, perspective generates spatiality, a deep field that allows us to "enter the scene"; at the same time, it creates a distance that allows us to observe the stage of the representation itself. The perspectival set of guidelines makes a figure or an object visible, and at the same time shows that it is an image: like an illusion, a wonderful yet unattainable artifice. In this sense, the perspectival representation and the framing of a picture are equal: both of them determine a threshold beyond which another dimension opens up, with no "weights or measures". A borderline, as suggested by the Latin expression in the title “finis terrae” (land's end),2 beyond which the gaze spills over into unknown land.
The collage has been made for the print edition with the same title, produced in the same year (GPE-0117).