Senza titolo, 2007

The image held by the two photographic hands reproduces an ocular cavity that inscribes the visual field of the observer, reclining in a room and intent on drawing, as suggested by the pencil in the left hand and the image of the same room he holds before himself. A blank rectangle, inserted in the area corresponding to the figure, duplicates the idea of a drawing as it is being made, and acts as the generating nucleus of a multitude of "sheets" gradually reduced in format, as if they were drawings gradually released by the author. The multiplication can also be found in the rectangles outlined in pencil on the "sheets" of the photographic image.
In this game of correspondences, the gazes of the reproduced figure, of the author, and of the viewer (we who watch from behind the ocular cavity) are identified in a single gaze, captured in its own becoming, and the actual subject of the work. In the artist's own words: “Vision is as if circumscribed, framed, caught by surprise off-stage, from behind the eye of the figure that watches and is watched. His gaze and our gaze overlap and coincide in the putting into focus of the sheet that, he and we, are looking at: the object and subject of a forced vision: I watch myself and watch myself watching".1
The collage has been made for the print edition Immacolata Concezione. Senza titolo / Senza firma produced in 2008 (GPE-0117)2. The same theme was reformulated in several variants, made using unnumbered copies of the print (GPC-1100, GPC-1131, GPC-1129, GPC-1758).

1 G. Paolini, Immacolata Concezione. Senza titolo / Senza autore, in Risonanze #2. Giulio Paolini e Fabio Vacchi, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Spazio Risonanze, Auditorium Parco della Musica (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2008), p. 76.
2 In the print the rectangles at the centre top and bottom are cut, which makes them look incomplete, while in this case they continue onto the grey sheet so that they appear to be whole.