Mnemosine (Les Charmes de la Vie/3-6), 1981-87

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 the 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.
The fourth work in the cycle involves four details from the eighteenth-century painting (from the third to the sixth, as the title tells us), installed between the same number of plaster columns which overall simulate a sort of pavilion, similar to the one delimited by four columns in the painting. Two canvases – corresponding to the third and the fourth detail of the original painting – are respectively located next to a column and on the ground in an upside down position, while the other two are situated on top of the columns and turned one upwards (sixth detail) and the other downwards (fifth detail).
The intention of the nine stations in the cycle is not that of gradually putting the puzzle of the old master work back together; on the contrary, the purpose here is to disperse its interpretation by evoking the individual details as if in a ciphered game. From one episode to another, 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.