Idea del Tempio della Pittura, 1983

The arrangement of the four plates in a horizontal sequence composes, at the centre, the fragmentary image of an ancient column, suggested by the capital and an incongruous plinth consisting of the details of different origins. Spreading out from this column, on both sides and in a mirror-like image is a perspectival drawing, which at the same time continues the visual cone, outlined in red starting from the two ends of the composition (in the latter plate the cone begins from the reproduction of an eye). In the visual field of this mirrored gaze is a series of randomly arranged trapezoidal rectangles gradually reduced (in compliance with the vanishing point of the perspective). Some of them are empty, others include the fragment of a drawing of columns; two rectangles offer a reproduction, in two parts, of the painting by David Allan The Origin of Painting (The Maid of Corinth) (1775), while the image in the last plate reproduces an architectural detail of a space with a column.1 The visual cone and the eye find a complementary figure in the drawing of the hand in the first plate, which seeks to hold down the dizzying "flight" of trapezoidal shapes.
The title – borrowed from the treatise of the same name by the Mannerist painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, who imagined a Neoplatonic theory of painting organized in the architectural structure of a temple – suggests the key to interpretation. The motif of the column alludes to a temple, while Allan's allegorical painting recalls the founding myth of painting. In this “Tempio della Pittura” (Temple of Painting), the gaze embraces a multitude of paintings – potentially endless – that echo the idea of painting, which nonetheless escapes any attempt at a univocal definition.
The original project on which the print is based was made in 1981 (GPC-0586) as a study for a large-scale work that was never realized.2

1 The painting by Allan represents the origins of painting according to the legend of Pliny the Elder that describes a young woman intent on fixing her lover's shadow on the wall. The photographic detail of a space is taken from a view of the Galerie Paul Maenz, Cologne.
2 The project was published in the art journal A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu (2, no. 3, March 1981, pp. 3-12), accompanied by a caption prepared by the editorial board announcing the work in preparation, “to be exhibited in two subsequent versions, that Summer in Berlin and in the Autumn in Paris. The first occasion is related to a solo show at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, which was planned for the Summer of 1981 but then postponed to the Summer of the following year (in which Paolini showed Del bello intelligibile. Parte quinta: “Museumsinsel”, GPO-0467, a work that can also be related to his interest in Lomazzo's theory); the aforementioned Paris exhibition instead remains unknown.