Statement, 1979

The portfolio – often exhibited and published as an artist's book – is made up of six plates folded in the middle and collected inside a cover. At the centre of each plate and overlapping the fold is the reproduction of the drawing of an ancient female figure – wearing a large ruffled dress and adorned with a diadem of laurel leaves – who is holding a square element in each hand. From one plate to the next, the pair of squares offers two images that complement each other.
In the first plate the two squares contain a photographic portrait of the artist as he makes the work Pendant, 1979,1 whose iconography gave rise to the portfolio. The two images are partially hidden by a torn blank sheet, which in the square to the left leaves the left part of the female figure drawn on the wall in sight, while the one to the right does the same for the right part of the figure.
In the second plate the figure holds two empty squares in conversation with two other square elements – one of them is in front of the other and the other one is in the background with respect to the square held by the figure – which respectively reproduce a hand holding a monochrome canvas 2 and a canvas viewed from the verso.
In the third plate the female figure is included in the drawing of a room seen in perspective, repeated as though it were reflected in the two squares held by the figure. Scattered over the entire plate are three torn fragments, taken from the reproduction of a frescoed room in Pompeii.3
In the fourth plate, the two squares held by the female figure host fragments of millimetric graph paper, blank paper, and the reproduction of the female figure itself, partially torn.
In the fifth plate (the exception to the rule), the female figure holds two other smaller female figures: to the left, a copy of itself, to the right, another Pompeiian figure.4
In the sixth plate the two squares include the drawing of several laurel leaves as they fall freely, with the drawing continuing outside the square by way of larger photographic leaves, in random order.
The succession of episodes presented by the ethereal female figure allude to the space of the representation itself, defined by a frame and understood as the potential container for any image, the theatre of visual events captured as they are taking place, with no communicative purpose. The figure, on its part, besides recalling the mythological dimension, which reverberates via distant echoes, can be likened to other Paolinian characters portrayed in the act of offering or showing some fragments of images to the gaze.
The cover that includes the six plates reproduces the same iconographic theme, developed mirror-like on the front and back boards. The drawing in white of the female figure overlaps, atop the boards, the full-bleed colour reproduction of a frescoed room from Pompeii. The two square elements held by the figure are two white squares here, which feature an author's statement (as the title tells us) in Italian on the front board, in German on the back one.5
The portfolio harkens back to the theme of the large-scale work titled Pendant, 1979 (GPO-0409), in which the figure is drawn on two opposite walls and holds a copy of square canvases, turned so that the one is viewed from the recto and the other from the verso, their positions inverted as they pass from one wall to another, while scattered on the floor are several laurel leaves recalling the allegorical ones on the head of the drawn figure.
The original collages of the six plates are documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at numbers GPC-0492, GPC-0493, GPC-0494, GPC-0495, GPC-0496 and GPC-0497.

1 The picture taken by Roman Franke shows Paolini while he is making Pendant (GPO-0409) at the Völkerkundemuseum in Munich on 8 April 1979, on the occasion of the group show Eine Ausstellung mit Werken von zwölf Künstlern, curated by Harald Szeemann (11 April - 10 May 1979).
2 In the picture taken by Anna Piva, the artist is holding his work Picnic, 1963 (GPO-0028).
3 The same view is reproduced in colour on the cover of the portfolio.
4 Like the main figure, the other female figure is a nymph or a bacchant, originally embracing a faun, borrowed from an image of ancient Pompeiian paintings.
5 The declaration of intent regarding his work is as follows: “All of my work takes place around a / diaphragm that is implicit to the image: like / an ideal mirror that reflects and reveals the / same appearances as the ones it is constituted by. / The nature of this artifice tends towards a / sort of paradoxical objectivity because / it introduces into the present, at the moment when the / perception occurs, a temporal / incompatibility: in other words, it imposes a type of reading / circular, rather than direct, the subtracts from / vision the value of the evidence. This takes place until the / ‘moment of truth’ that is always / extraneous to any intention: what remains / is the pure presence (in the sense of the sublime or of the / insignificant) of a work whose destiny is / to increase the endless theory of / discoveries that enliven the unfathomable course / or art”. The text harkens back to a statement formulated during a conversation with N. Orengo in 1975 (cf. “Una domanda discreta”, in Libri Nuovi 7, no. 1 [Turin], journal published by the publisher Einaudi on library and cultural information, June, 1975, p. 8).