Dal “Trionfo della rappresentazione” (cerimoniale: in prospettiva), 1985-86

The assemblage of twenty-seven framed sheets, arranged in three rows so that they make up a large painting, offers a perspectival representation whose central vanishing point corresponds to the image of Disegno geometrico (1960, GPO-0001). Analogous to the squaring of that first painting, the nine central units are marked by diagonals, traced in red, which at the same time serve as the vanishing lines of the perspective containing nine male figures dressed as valets de chambre, each of whom is holding an empty plexiglas cube. Delineated in the lateral sections of the painting are two long rectangles divided into twenty-seven rectangles and squared in the central part, corresponding to two views in perspective of the work itself. Scattered over the entire painting are torn fragments borrowed from the poster of a previous exhibition by the artist. Some of these fragments fall in the area corresponding to the cubes offered by the valets.
The valet de chambre, taken from French eighteenth-century theatre iconography, introduced in 1983-84 in the form of silhouettes, and since 1985 also used in a photographic version, represents 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 is part of a themed group of works which began in 1983-84 with Trionfo della rappresentazione (GPO-0507) and was developed in various formulation until 1987 (cf. GPO-0539, GPO-0554, GPO-0605, GPO-0607).