Esposizione universale, 1992

Applied at the centre of the black sheet of paper is a photographic image that reproduces – in an angular perspective and from an elevated point of view – Paolini's work titled Esposizione universale, 1992 (GPO-0705), in the final phase of its production, at the Alpeat company, which commissioned the print. The work reproduced, made up entirely of plexiglas, consists of two juxtaposed cubes: the one at the bottom serves as a base; the one at the top encloses two other juxtaposed, smaller cubes, while etched at the centre of each side is a drawing of squares. The photograph was taken at night by Paolo Mussat Sartor, hence the presence of the lamps reflected in the plexiglas of the structure, amplifying the complex game of transparencies and reflections. Against the black background, a white drawing continues the lines that define the structure reproduced in the photograph, also reproducing the night-time setting. Scattered across the ensemble are nine quadrilaterals, distorted into trapezoids in keeping with the perspectival vision, twirling in the virtual space as though they were squares emerging from the plexiglas structure; three of them are white, while the others reproduce the details of a night-time or daytime sky.
The overall image is based on the marked optical illusion generated by the angular perspective – emphasized by the front corner, which coincides with the vertical median axis – juxtaposed with the two-dimensionality of the picture plane, in turn underscored by the fact that the central photograph and the nine quadrilaterals are applied by collage. It is a perceptive complexity that refers to the distinctive artifices of the representation and its immaterial dimension. And in this sense, the print is connected to the large-scale work that inspired it, Esposizione universale, which offers the very idea of the exhibition – symbolically represented by the model of an exhibition space – as a place dedicated to the representation and its games of illusions, mirages, doubles.