Unisono, 1974

Giulio Paolini's sole videographic work, one minute long, presents in rapid succession ninety-two black and white photographs of his works, from Disegno geometrico, 1960 (GPO-0001) to Post Scriptum, 1974 (GPE-0012)1. The rapidity of the images going by eliminates almost entirely the possibility of identifying the works, creating an imperceptible summa of the photograms, as if all the works were joined in unison, as the title suggests. In the artist's own words: “Ninety-two works, dated from 1960 to 1974, forget their original image and tend to identify, in the 'space' of a minute, a habitual and unknown dimension: that of a painting”2.
The difference between perception and identification contradicts the cinematic nature of the video, whereas the overlapping of all the works in a single, undecipherable one, reformulates in other terms the fundament of Paolinian research: the work intended as a potential container of all the works imaginable, the work as the suspension of a univocal image and in itself complete in favour of an uninterrupted and undecipherable flow of echoes, reflections, fragments, that is, the minimum units of a hypothetical narrative.
To produce the video at the Florentine production studio art/tapes/22, the artist applied each of the ninety-two photographic prints to a larger blank sheet; the photographs were then filmed and edited by Bill Viola, the video operator and technical director of art/tapes/22 at the time.

1 The sequence of ninety-two images, reproduced at a speed of eight images per second, is repeated five times over the sixty-second running time of the video.
2 G. Paolini, Idem (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1975), p. 91, new edition (Milan: Electa, 2023), p. 117.