Senza titolo, 1987

The work is made up of two parts – located on two opposite walls – each of which consists of four elements placed at short intervals. The valets contained along the vanishing lines of the perspective drawing of a room hold the fragments of the image of an ancient perspectival representation. The columns and the obelisks that in the first picture appear to be cut out are offered by the valets in the second picture, where a fifth figure, standing in the area corresponding to the vanishing point, also holds the colour image of a globe.
The valet de chambre, taken from French eighteenth-century theatre iconography and introduced in 1983-84 in Trionfo della rappresentazione (GPO-0507), 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 subject of the work.