Prima o poi, 2023
GPE-0121
Sooner or Later
Lithograph and collage
Fedrigoni Siro black and Symbol freelife satin
Two plates 30 x 30 cm each
Signed on the recto of the plate with a white background, bottom right: “Giulio Paolini”
Handwritten numbering, not by the artist, on the recto of the plate with a black background, bottom left
35 in Arabic numerals from 1/35 to 35/35
20 in Roman numerals from I/XX to XX/XX
Edizioni l’Obliquo, Brescia
Grafica Sette Srl and Seven Media, Bagnolo Mella (Brescia)
The edition is part of the activity of Edizioni l’Obliquo, Brescia – founded in 1986 by Giorgio Bertelli – dedicated to the publication of artist books, graphic editions, unpublished non-fiction and poetry accompanied by a print or an original drawing conceived by a contemporary artist.
Double-sided white stock folder, with inside pocket, closed format 30.5 x 30.5 cm; cover with titles in red and black (author, title, publisher). Contains a title-page (on the recto the same as the cover, but with the title in black, on the verso acknowledgements and copyright), a note by the artist, the two prints and the colophon.
Includes information regarding the printer, edition size, printing technique, type of paper, place and date of printing (Brescia, 31 December 2023). Numbering bottom centre.
Note by the artist, Prima o poi, referring to the subject of the edition.
The two plates must be lined up horizontally at a short distance from each other.
The two plates propose two similar yet distinct images reproducing a male figure seen from behind, on the shore, observing the horizon. The two images, which mirror each other, are applied to the centre of a black sheet in the first case, and to a white one in the second. The figure is reproduced in positive in the plate with the black background, and in negative, in the manner of a silhouette, in the plate with the white background. The seascape is set at night in the image on the black sheet, and during the daytime in the image on the white sheet. Each plate also features a rectangle at the centre: in the image with the black background the rectangle is white, while in the image with the white background it is black.
The construction of the two images is based on the ambivalent position of the rectangle at the centre, which seems to be located in the figure's visual field, and at the same time behind it. The gaze captures nothing well defined and itself becomes the subject of the image.
In the artist's own words: “Once, twice, each time we find ourselves looking at the horizon we can but see it twice: first, as the border we are familiar with, then as what lies beyond, which we cannot observe but only imagine."1
The title harkens back to that of a large-scale work made in 1996-97, in which the alternating of frames and rectangles, positive and negative, black and white, defers open-endedly, as the title suggests, the definition of a fulfilled image (GPO-0785).
The motif of the figure on the shore was developed in 2016 and 2017 in a small series of works on paper, without a title, including the original collage from which the print originates, documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of works on paper at number GPC-1981 (for the variants cf. GPC-1518, GPC-1519, GPC-1982).
1 G. Paolini, Prima o poi, text included in the folder that contains the print.
| • | G. Paolini, Prima o poi, note to the work included with the print edition. |
