Finis terrae, 2023
GPE-0160
UV print, collage, pencil and red pencil drawing
Fedrigoni Premium White 270 g (sheet), Garda Matt 115 g (perspectival view), Garda Matt 130 g (female figure)
Plate 40 x 28 cm folded, 40 x 56 cm open
Signed on the recto, bottom right: “Giulio Paolini”
Handwritten numbering, not by the artist, on the recto, bottom left
40 in Arabic numerals from 1/40 to 40/40
30 in Roman numerals from I/XXX to XXX/XXX
5 ad personam from 1 AdP to 5 AdP
Colophonarte, Belluno
EDP Euro Digital Printing, Sant’Angelo Lodigiano (LO)
The print was commissioned from the artist by Colophonarte, Belluno – a publishing house founded in 1985 and directed by Egidio Fiorin – on the occasion of the publication of the book by Giorgio Griffa and Giulio Paolini titled Parole e immagini a due voci, with texts and drawings by the two artists.
Giorgio Griffa, Giulio Paolini, Parole e immagini a due voci, Colophonarte, Belluno 2023. 40 x 30 cm, 104 pages, bound. Letters between the authors, texts and drawings by the authors. Print run 65 copies in Arabic numerals, 30 in Roman numerals, and 5 ad personam; the first 40 copies in Arabic numerals, the copies in Roman numerals, and the copies ad personam, inserted in a natural canvas case tied with leather strings, include one print by Paolini and one by Griffa, inserted in the boards, respectively, front and back between four triangular pockets.
The colophon of the book includes information regarding the contents, printing technique, and print run of the book, printer, technique and measurements of the two print editions, publisher (in collaboration with Archivio Giorgio Griffa and Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini), date and place of printing (”giorno di Sant’Evaristo”, Belluno). Numbering bottom centre.
Ten short unpublished texts by the artist, in handwritten calligraphy and accompanied by the same number of drawings, concerning the use of perspective in his work, as an expedient that calls into play and observes from a distance the very idea of representation.
Applied to the sheet of paper, with a fold in the middle, is the reproduction of an architectural drawing borrowed from a seventeenth-century handbook on perspective.1 The red rectangle emphasizes the linear layout directed towards the vanishing point at the centre of the image. Some of the lines of the perspectival construction continue in red all around the image in the manner of wheel spokes, while a rectangle made in pencil circumscribes the seventeenth-century drawing, echoing the internal rectangle. Visible in the foreground is the image of Antonio Canova's Danzatrice con i cembali (Dancer with Cymbals) (1812), applied by collage; although the figure is turned towards the horizon line, it seems to shirk from the intensity of the vision, as indicated by the head bent rightwards and the bent arm.
The theme of the perspective recalls the notes the artist wrote for the book that is accompanied by the print, which clarify the reasons for the use of this expedient that is so essential to his work. For Paolini, perspective generates spatiality, a deep field that allows us to "enter the scene"; at the same time, it creates a distance that allows us to observe the stage of the representation itself. The perspectival set of guidelines makes a figure or an object visible, and at the same time shows that it is an image: like an illusion, a wonderful yet unattainable artifice. In this sense, the perspectival representation and the framing of a picture are equal: both of them determine a threshold beyond which another dimension opens up, with no "weights or measures". A borderline, as suggested by the Latin expression in the title “finis terrae” (land's end),2 beyond which the gaze spills over into unknown land.
• Figure: Antonio Canova, Danzatrice con i cembali, 1812, plaster, 187 x 80 x 55 cm, Bode Museum, Berlin.
• Perspective drawing: Jan Vredeman de Vries, Perspective (Leiden-The Ague: Beuckel Nieulandt for Hendrick Hondius, 1604-05); reproduction from Jan Vredeman de Vries, Perspective (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), n. pag.
