Ennesima (appunti per sei disegni datati 1975), 1975

The sequence of six images offers a progressive and grid-like subdivision of the surface of the sheet, which at the beginning appears to be a written page, outlined by a rectangle marking its limits (the écriture automatique intends to be a hypothetical description of the work itself). The multiplication of the drawn pattern gradually takes over until it replaces the scriptural image completely.
“Hence, three elements: the writing, the image, time. Each of them, however, is exhausted in its own nominal enunciation and, all together, they cannot be seen as constitutive. Writing, overlooking any form of communication, preserves nothing other than its appearance, it describes nothing other than itself. The drawing is the extreme limit of its own legitimacy, the definition of the surface of the page. Time suggests the pattern and determines, via the succession of the two elements that reveal it, the enigmatic measure of the story: it subtracts further truthfulness from both the writing and the drawing, it regulates their co-penetration in a constantly variable identity, multipliable to infinity, but unalterable by fate. The first page is already the last one, the last one is still the first, the sequence moves from one equal towards an equal. Here, then, is the neutrality of a dynamic that, again via the use of the same elements, achieves none other than its own infinitesimal development. The title Ennesima (Umpteenth), in fact, is meant to recall the possibility of elevation ad infinitum of this process. As if to say that it is perhaps not so obvious to establish that the figurative, visual dimension, is born as a pure and simple image, and that it may instead have the implicit and intimate need to describe itself, the vocation to find another more definitive form of itself”,1 the artist writes.
The portfolio is part of a group with the same theme developed on paper and on canvas between 1973 and 1992 (cf. among the works on paper GPC-0232, GPC-0847 and among the paintings GPO-0255, GPO-0297, GPO-0625).

1 G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. Atto unico in tre quadri, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Studio Marconi (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta editore, 1979), p. 107.