Théogonie, 1982

The intricate tangle of lines traced freely with coloured felt-tip markers on photographic canvas allows an intersecting of visions to show through. John Flaxman's Vision d’Hésiode,1 printed in negative on canvas and segmented by a cut-out, encloses, in the visual field of the reclining figure, the vision of the missing fragment turned over by 180 degrees. Hesiod's gaze, possessed by poetic inspiration evokes our own gaze that from the perception of undecipherable polychrome signs, absorbed by the darkness of the background, waits to see the surfacing of the presumed "revelation". A “vision” that the gaze cannot "touch", not even where the "drawing" continues from and goes beyond the painting, becoming lost in a ring of short coloured lines.
In the first exhibition of Théogonie in Turin in 1983 Paolini used coloured pencils to extend on the walls the visual angles of the gazes of the figures reproduced on the photographic canvas. In 1999, on the occasion of the exhibition of the work at the GAM in Turin, he added to the canvas a tangle of lines made with coloured felt-tip markers, while in May 2011 he added to the work the current drawing on the wall.

1 William Blake's engraving after a drawing by Flaxman is part of the collection of thirty-six engravings inspired by Hesiod's Theogony (cf. J. Flaxman, Compositions from the Works and Days and Theogony of Hesiod, engraved by William Bake [London: 1817]).