Delfo, 1965

The front view photograph of the artist, partially concealed behind a stretcher, with his arms folded and wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, is printed on an emulsified canvas mounted on the same stretcher used for the photograph.
The author is in the painting, but he sees himself as being extraneous to it; he puts forward his portrait, but he subtracts himself from his own identity: he is and he isn’t there at the same time. Half-hidden, almost eclipsed, the author waives the active role of the demiurge which is up to the artificer, and instead assumes the viewer’s contemplative position.
He who addresses this enigmatic “oracle” – the title, "Delphos", recalls the sanctuary of Classical Greece where Apollo’s famous Delphic Oracle can be found – receives no answer. Before the viewer’s expectations, the author folds his arms: he has no truth to declare. Actually, he seems to acquire the very role of the person awaiting an answer. Instead of performing the “art of divination”, the author-cum-oracle formulates a question on the very relationship between the viewer and the painting, or between the painting and the author. He calls into play neither past nor future, nor the world, and even less so his own Self: instead of expression and communication he prefers the silence of unanswerable questions, a reflection on being there and not being there with respect to himself, his work and the beholder.
In this sense, Delfo represents a first culminating moment of Paolini's research, which began in 1960 with Disegno geometrico (GPO-0001) and was delved into more deeply and in an exemplary way in the self-portraits of 1965.