Mnemosine (Les Charmes de la Vie/7), 1981-84

Mnemosine (Les Charmes de la Vie) is the general title of a cycle of works, initially designed to contain nine episodes (an analogy with the number of letters contained in the name Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses), but in the end condensed into just six parts (GPO-0460, GPO-0504, GPO-0511, GPO-0599, GPO-0621, GPO-0677). A common denominator is the presence of one or more paintings, reproducing the details of Jean-Antoine Watteau's painting entitled Les Charmes de la Vie (1717-18). The canvases, commissioned by Paolini from a scenic painter, comprise the division into nine equal parts of an enlarged copy of the eighteenth-century painting, absent the figures that originally filled it. From one work to the other, the artist associated to the details of the painting a corresponding number of objects: for instance, he added two elements to the second detail, seven elements to the seventh detail, and so on and so forth. From one station to another, the principal elements making up the spatiality of Watteau's painting – sky, chair, columns, floor – are staged in echoes and amplifications, in declaredly theatrical terms in harmony with the register used by the French painter.
Time after time Watteau's scene becomes a stage that by definition opens up a painting before the gaze of the person overlooking its threshold: the space of the representation, with its artifices and its intimate theatricality.
In the third episode of the cycle, the seventh detail of Watteau's painting (the lower left corner) is set down on the ground and associated with seven different elements: six primed canvases seen from the recto or the verso, arranged before, behind, or just above the painted canvas, and a gilded frame, placed so that it looks like it was propped up against the chair represented in the scene.