Trionfo della rappresentazione, 1983-84

The idea for Trionfo della rappresentazione was conceived in 1983 as a project for a set design, which was never realized.1 Developments from the original idea led to this site-specific work, consisting of a three-part slide projection on three walls of a room, and by a collage of torn fragments of reproductions (taken from posters or exhibition catalogues of the artist's work), applied to the wall in correspondence with the luminous images.2 The projections present the silhouettes of nine figures wearing livery (the images are of two, three, or four valets), represented in the gesture of holding something in front of themselves and part of the perspectival drawing of a room. The fragments scattered on the wall at times seem to be offered by the valets, at other times are suspended in the void to evoke appearances and disappearances in the "theatre of representation".
The valet de chambre, taken from French eighteenth-century theatre iconography and used for the first time in this work, introduces a particularly significant character in Paolini's poetics. The gesture of offering or handing something that defines the valet – analogous with that of presenting and observing, which distinguishes other figures in costume appearing in previous works – symbolically corresponds for Paolini to the act of representation itself, understood to be a device that guides the gaze towards the construction of an image (for instance, through the artifices of perspective). Anonymous and detached valets also refer to the role that Paolini attributes to the author: rather than inventing or demonstrating something, he limits himself to elevating the gesture of the offer to the very topic of the work. By way of the stand-in of the valet, the author exits the scene to take his seat in the audience and assume the role of the spectator, who before the work waits or listens, awaiting the offer that it announces to his gaze and that the gesture of the valet makes evident. Renouncing his role as a creator, the author who becomes spectator of the "theatre" of the work of art as such finds a way to emphasize and therefore offer to our gaze the "miracles" of the representation itself, that is, to celebrate its "triumph".
The work was the first in a themed group of works developed in various versions until 1987 (cf. GPO-0539, GPO-0554, GPO-0562, GPO-0605, GPO-0607).

1 The mise-en-scène was meant to involve nine anonymous male figures dressed as valets de chambre, each of which arranged on a plexiglas base – so that they appeared as if suspended in an abstract space – along the diagonals of the room (theoretically their placement referred back to the median points and the centre of the squaring of Disegno geometrico, GPO-0001). Each valet was supposed to hold an object before himself. When the signal was given, the lights in the room were to have gone off and the objects to have fallen to the ground, while the figures exited the scene. Soon afterwards, the lights would have gone on again, and remaining in an uninhabited scene would be the fragments that had remained on the ground, as the trace of an illusory apparition.
2. In an intermediate phase of the curriculum of the work, during its permanence in a private collection from 1985 to 2007, Paolini reformulated it in relation to the limited space available in the owner's home, replacing the three fixed projections with a single one of 80 slides. On a single wall the three images in the work were projected in alternating succession.