L’ospite, 1989-91

The lithographic image, applied to a white sheet of paper, features at the centre a photograph that looks like a painting propped up on the chair in the foreground and offered to the viewer's gaze. The photograph reproduces, at the background of a door that is ajar, two opposing chairs, on each of which is an image of a painter at work: to the right is the painting Nota intima (1887) by Angelo Garino, to the left the self-portrait of William Hogarth as he paints the Comic Muse;1 peering out in between the chairs is a cosmic image that symbolically alludes to the fulfilled picture that the painter attempts to put into focus. To the left of the photograph, the detail of the chair with Hogarth's self-portrait is repeated, thus suggesting a chair opposite the one in the foreground so as to reproduce the offsetting of the two chairs in the photograph. Against the black background is a blank surface, juxtaposed with the drawing of a reversed canvas, thus recalling the recto and the verso of a painting.
The composition, based on a refined game of doublings and mirror-like juxtapositions, as well as on the motif of the painter at work – in particular in Garino's painting, the composition's generating nucleus – recall a painting in the making that has countless possible faces, included between the recto and the verso of a canvas. Related to this theme as well is the title, which refers to the role that Paolini attributes to the author, who prefers to be a "guest" of the scene, rather than a demiurgic director or the lead actor, assuming the guise of the viewer who watches the unpredictable becoming of an image, without claiming any authorial right.
The edition is based on the image conceived for the invitation to the solo show at the Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, in 1989. Indeed, the iconographic theme recalls the eponymous large-scale work on display (GPO-0643). See also the variant on paper, Studio per “L’ospite”, 1989, with a cosmic background instead of a black one, documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at number GPC-0769.

1 Garino's painting represents an interior with a woman seated to the left, as she observes the painter intent on painting the scene of a couple, it too with a female figure seated to the left. Hogarth's painting corresponds to the final state (1764) of the self-portrait entitled William Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse, in which the English artist is intent upon painting the Comic Muse, portrayed while holding the mask of a satyr in one hand and associated with the word "Comedy" etched on the base of the column to the right; Hogarth's own treatise on beauty (The Analysis of Beauty) lies at the foot of the easel. Hogarth's print is in fact located on the floor off-stage: on a chair to the left its image is reflected in an oval mirror. Both Garino's painting and Hogarth's engraving are part of Giulio Paolini's private collection.