Uno Due Nessuno Centomila, 2017
GPE-0136
One Two None A Hundred Thousand
Lithograph and silkscreen
Plate 25 x 17.5 cm folded, 25 x 35 cm open
Signed on the recto, bottom right: “Giulio Paolini”
Autograph numbering on the recto, bottom left
40 in Arabic numerals from 1/40 to 40/40
4 artist’s proofs in Roman numerals from I/IV to IV/IV
Alberto Tallone Editore, Alpignano (Turin)
The print was commissioned from the artist by the publishing house Alberto Tallone Editore, Alpignano (Turin) – directed by Aldo and Enrico Tallone – on the occasion of the publication of the volume by Emily Dickinson titled Poems. The publisher's catalogue includes deluxe books of past and contemporary prose and poetry, created and produced entirely by hand.
Emily Dickinson, Poems (Turin: Alberto Tallone Editore, 2017). 26 x 16.5 cm, 180 pages, bound with soft cover, double hard casing. Foreword and edited by Barbara Lanati, poems by the author, in English, no illustrations. Limited edition of 260 numbered copies (on different types of paper) with grey cover and casing and 40 numbered copies (of the print run on Magnani Toscana paper) with blue cover and casing that include the folded print edition, inserted in a white sleeve with flaps, enclosed with the book in the same place where Emily Dickinson's poem cited by the artist is located.
The book includes a colophon for the print with information about edition size, signature at the centre, and a colophon for the book with information about font, type of paper, print run, place and date of printing (Alpignano, September 2017).
The image at the centre of the plate reproduces twice the detail of Emily Dickinson's hands. The hands in the foreground hold a printed fragment with the first quatrain of the poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (1891), while the hands in the middle ground remain half-hidden. From the centre outwards a drawing of expanding squares echoes the duplication of the photographic image, while some rectangles in random order multiply the sheet with the text.
The title, which, if taken literally sums up in extreme synthesis the composition of the image – from One (the point of departure of the hands) to Two (the doubling of the One) to One Hundred Thousand (the potentially unlimited multiplication) – creates an implicit homage not only to the idea of the depersonalization formulated by the American poet (”I'm Nobody”), but also to the poetics of one of Paolini's favourite writers, Luigi Pirandello. Indeed, the Sicilian author's last novel, Uno, nessuno e centomila (1926) – in which the main character is one, many and no one all at the same time – resonates in the title.1 In Paolini's universe, the fragmentation of the Self, the waiving of any identity, the cancellation and disappearance interest the figure of the author, his being "outside": outside the world, life, and himself, as well as outside of the work.
The original collage from which the print originates is documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at number GPC-1642.
1 The Pirandellian title also appears in the work on paper Uno, nessuno, centomila, made in 2023, whose protagonist is Luigi Pirandello himself (GPC-2266).
William C. North, Emily Dickinson, 1847, daguerreotype, Amherst College, Massachussets.
