Senza titolo, 1964

This work, which was made for the solo show in Rome in 1964 and later dismembered by the artist, consisted of a plywood panel propped up against a wall at the top of which was a spatula covered in pigment. Like the paintbrushes in a variant of the work (GPO-0061) these elements implicitly alluded to a hypothetical painting, still in the making.
The work is part of the research that distinguishes the artist's output in 1964, characterized by simple plywood panels that when laid on the ground or hung from the wall, in the artist's words, “‘replaced’ the presence of pictures on the walls and analyzed the purely conventional rapports of an exhibition” (1973).1

1 G. Paolini, "Note di lavoro", in NAC 3 (Milan), March, 1973, p. 10. Cf. also Paolini's letter to Plinio De Martiis on 4 July 1964, in which, after critical considerations with respect to the triumph of Pop Art at the 1964 Venice Biennale, the artist reveals in advance to the Roman art dealer the project of his own exhibition in these terms: "My ‘exhibition’, once the Biennale ends, will finally be an explicit representation, a definitive one, of the current situation, and the intention is already there to direct my activity towards a state of simply ‘being’, with no further mediations, expedients, or any other type of aesthetic accessories" (manuscript in the Archivio di Stato di Latina, La Tartaruga Collection, Folder 26).