Mnemosine, 1979-80

The work consists of nine canvases featuring the drawing of the same number of canvases seen in perspective, as well as the nine letters of the name Mnemosine [Mnemosyne], the goddess of memory and the mother of the nine Muses. The sequence of letters written in red pencil that gradually become smaller begins on the first canvas, with the initial letter written at the top left, while the development of the pencil drawing begins on the second canvas, with the image in perspective of the previous canvas (the perspectival fiction is corroborated by the nails placed along the faux thickness of the drawn canvas). Time after time the letters and the four-sided shapes move away towards infinity, until the writing and the drawing coincide with the vanishing point on the last canvas.
Six of the nine canvases bear a supplementary intervention. The canvas without a drawing, which provides the first letter in the name Mnemosyne, is three-quarters wrapped in several layers of white drawing paper, with burn marks along the torn side (“fire, in the beginning, as birth and the discovery of a word").1 The three canvases featuring one, three and four drawn canvases, respectively, are distinguished by a collage of reproductions.2 On the verso of the canvas with seven drawn shapes is a pencil drawing reproducing a garland of laurel leaves; since 1981, the collage of real leaves applied to the canvas with eight drawn canvases has served as a pendant to it.
The installation of the work – attempts were made at different configurations, but the artist formulated the definitive one in 2006, when the work was acquired by the Kunst Museum Winterthur – involves the arrangement of eight canvases against the wall (in two rows), in both a horizontal and a vertical position, and alternatively from the recto and the verso, while the ninth canvas is laid on the floor, upside down and tilted. Laurel leaves scattered in part on the canvas lying on the ground and in part on the floor disperse the ideal garland drawn on the two adjacent canvases propped up against the wall.
The essential theme of the work is in fact the dispersion of a subject that subtracts itself from the gaze: in the perspectival drawing developed from one canvas to another, neither the progression of the canvases nor the name Mnemosine succeed in creating an image that is legible as a whole. In a reading of the composite whole, the vanishing point moves away infinitely, the One is dispersed in the multiple.

1 G. Paolini interviewed by B. Marcelis, in Domus 607 (Milan), June, 1980, p. 48.
2 The three collages are respectively made up of a photographic portrait of the artist hidden behind a white book (cf. GPO-0241), by the photograph of a ruler on a white sheet pinned to a black background, and by the reproduction of a double page from the Antologia Palatina (Book VII, epigrams 8-10), in which there is a poem evoking the weeping of Mnemosyne's daughters over the death of Orpheus.