Il Fauno di marmo, 1981
GPO-0451
The Marble Faun
Photo emulsion on canvas
132 x 196 cm (two parts 132 x 98 cm each)
Titled, signed, and dated on the verso of the second canvas, upper stretcher bar, left: "Il fauno di marmo / Giulio Paolini / 1981"
Giorgio Marconi Collection, Milan
Two photographic canvases placed side by side reproduce the same view of the ruins of the Library of Pergamum, doubled specularly so that the trajectory of the divergent colonnades evokes a visual angle. The landscape of ruins serves as a backdrop to the mise-en-scène of two identical images of the Resting Satyr (or Marble Faun), placed opposite each other to form an incongruous chimerical figure: the legs of one of the two are grafted onto the trunk that the figure is leaning up against, while their two torsos are joined specularly.
The work was the first in a series of nine works, made between 1981 and 1982, in which each time the reproduction of the antique sculpture cited in the title is added to the landscape of ruins (GPO-0451, from GPO-0470 to GPO-0477). The group of works is related to the collages made in the same year for a book co-authored with René Denizot for the Galerie Yvon Lambert (De bouche à oreille / Hearsay, Paris 1982).
• Resting Satyr, Roman copy of the 4th century BC original by Praxiteles, marble, h 170 cm, Musei Capitolini, Rome; reproduction from Francis Haskell, Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 209, fig. 108 (“Marble Faun”).
• Image of the ruins taken from Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 72.
| 1992 | Bologna, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, La pensée tangible / Il pensiero tangibile. Otto percorsi esemplari in Francia e in Italia, 25 January - 7 March, touring to: Molfetta, Sala dei Templari, March-April; Lille, Château de l’Hermitage, Condé sur l’Escaut, June-August, repr. p. 19 (erroneously dated “1982”), referred to in the text by A.M. Sauzeau p. 19. |
| 2007 | Milan, Galleria Giò Marconi, Giulio Paolini, 4 May - 27 July. |
| • | Autobiografia di una galleria. Lo Studio Marconi 1965/1992 (Milan: Skira editore, 2004), repr. p. 215. |
| • | G. Iovane, “Il museo senza muse / A Museum with no Muses”, in Janus 23 (Brussels), January, 2008, repr. |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 451 p. 461, repr. |
| • | B. Satre, “Giulio Paolini, entre fragment et fragmentation”, in Influxus, online journal, 28 May 2014. |
