Contemplator enim, 1991

The seven plates reproduce two views of the entrance hall of Giulio Paolini's home in Turin – an angular view in the first and last plate, a view from the front in the intermediate ones – which become the theatre of a different episode each time.
In the first plate, the model of an exhibition space, placed on a black pedestal, hosts in the background a blank surface, a painting without a face. In the second plate, a spotlight on the ceiling converses with a photograph, arranged diagonally, that reproduces a photographer intent on arranging the lights of a photographic set. In the third plate, a pair of valets wearing theatre costumes holds seven photographic details (as many as the plates in the folder itself) of plaster fragments.1 In the fourth plate, an ancient view of Piazza Vittorio Veneto in Turin (overlooked by Paolini's home) serves as a backdrop, while at the centre, in the area corresponding to the vanishing point of the perspective, a hand holds a blank sheet that is dispersed in fragments, scattered on this side of the illusory view of the city. In the fourth plate, a drawn self-portrait of the artist, with a drawing pin in the area corresponding to the left eye, overlaps the image of a blank canvas, set down on an easel, thus alluding to the role of the "guest" assumed by the author before the work of art.2 In the sixth plate, the verso of the painting that in Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez the painter is intent on painting is offset by a blank canvas, which reflects the unknown identity of the painting hidden from our gaze.3 Lastly, the seventh plate features the image of a large modular metal structure,4 inside which a reflector is turned towards a copy of the photograph itself of the entrance hall in Paolini's home.
The print edition is part of the main work theme of 1991, based on the drawing and on the photographic reproduction of Paolini's home, with two doors at the rear.5 The Latin expression in the title (”behold thus”– borrowed from the poem De rerum natura (1st century BC) by the Roman philosopher and poet Titus Lucretius Carus – recalls the lines in which our gaze is invited to contemplate the movement of the atoms in the bundle of light of several sunbeams filtering into a dark room.6 In the prints, the invitation to observe is translated into the mise-en-scène of episodes announcing to the gazer hypothetical images, ones still without an identity, inviting him to wait. Hence, the exit from the stage of the author, who privileges the role of the viewer, the emphasis on the visual act, the direction of the spotlights on the space of the representation, the use of perspective and trompe-l’œil as devices of the gaze, the blank canvas as the projection screen of any image possible, the modular structure as the potential container of all the works imaginable.
The ensemble of original collages on which the portfolio is based is documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at number GPC-0807.

1 The details come from the poster made for the solo show at the Studio Marconi, Milan, in 1984 (cf. the description of print edition GPE-0051 at note 1).
2 The image reproduces the artist's work titled L’ospite, 1986 (GPO-0569). The drawn face, outlined after a portrait taken by the photographer Gérard Amséllem in 1983, is also corroborated in two other prints from 1991 (GPE-0081, GPE-0082).
3 In this sense, the blank canvas recalls the role of the mirror at the back of the room in the painting by Velázquez – in which the image of the Spanish Royals that the painter is presumably intent on portraying is reflected – as Paolini notes in his interview with M. Bourel, Giulio Paolini. Contemplateur donc, in Art Press 164 (Paris), December, 1991, p. 20.
4 The structure based on the multiplication of Disegno geometrico (cf. GPO-0001), recalled through the dimensions and the diagonals, represents a three-dimensional version of that conceptual matrix and fundament for Paolini's poetics. The volumetric structure, which appears here for the first time, was made the following year, to install the artist's solo shows at the Christian Stein, Milan and Yvon Lambert, Paris galleries, in the fall of 1992. The drawing of the structure can also be found in the print titled Promenade, 1992 (GPE-0088).
5 The theme is explored first in the large-forrmat works titled Contemplator enim (cfr. GPO-0681, GPO-0683), while among the works on paper from 1991 a similar iconography can be found in several untitled studies (GPC-0812, GPC-0813, GPC-0814, GPC-0817, GPC-0818, GPC-0819).
6 Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book II, l. 114 ff.