La visione è simmetrica?, 1972

Akin to Nove quadri datati dal 1967 al 1971 visti in prospettiva (1972, GPO-0233), the horizon line delimits a vanishing point of presumed "paintings", in this case a multitude of quadrilaterals carved into the primed canvas and marked in pencil with their relative diagonals.
The question asked in the title interrogates the space of the representation: what we look at in a painting is the image of something, and certainly not that something in itself; the contingent vision does not coincide with the spatio-temporal dimension evoked by way of the perspective. In the artist's own words: “Is vision symmetrical? The image is implicit to the picture, perception is parallel to the image, time is extraneous to perception”.1
The work is part of the group of large-scale works made for the solo show at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in November 1972 (cf. GPO-0232, and from GPO-0234 to GPO-0240). The common denominator of these works is the proportional parameter of Disegno geometrico, the first painting made by the artist in 1960 (GPO-0001), as well as, in most of the cases, the median horizontal division that serves as a horizon line for the perspectival construction introduced precisely in this series of works. Perspective is used as a conceptual device to expand the spatio-temporal dimension of the painting, including countless possible works, the artist's own and those of others, pre-existing or hypothetical.

1 G. Paolini in La visione è simmetrica?, text written to accompany the works exhibited at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, November 1972, first published in Italian in 420 West Broadway at Spoleto Festival. 33 Artists shown, exhibition catalogue, Spoleto, XV Festival dei Due Mondi, 1972, n. pag.; republished in Id., Idem (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1975), p. 70, new edition (Milan: Electa, 2023), p. 96.