Passe-partout, 1988

In an ambiguous dialectic between perspectival spatiality and two-dimensional picture plane, the space outlined in perspective hosts a male figure wearing a theatre costume who holds or presents the cut-out square at the centre of the sheet.1 At the same time the blank square suggests a square situated on the back wall of the drawn room.
The drawing of the room can be understood as a “passepartout” framing the empty square: as the framing of the space of representation, as the announcement, with the curtain still lowered, of an event or an apparition, corresponding to the optical focus and the vanishing point of the perspective. Indeed, for Paolini the eighteenth-century valet, defined by the gesture of offering, corresponds to the act itself of representation, intended as a device that offers the gaze the construction of an image.
The print harkens back to the iconographic theme of the large-scale work with the same title, made during the same period (GPO-0631).

1 For the figure of the valet, taken from French eighteenth-century theatre iconography, cf. the portfolio Dal “Trionfo della rappresentazione” (cerimoniale: l’artista è assente), 1986 (GPE-0058), and the site-specific work Trionfo della rappresentazione, 1983-84 (GPO-0507).