Dal “Trionfo della rappresentazione” (cerimoniale: conquista dell’orizzonte), 1987

The iconography of the six elements placed at short intervals converges towards the central area, which coincides with a blank square torn in two and squared by red diagonals (a symbolic allusion to the artist's first painting, Disegno geometrico, 1960, GPO-0001). The side elements are brought to life by nine valets in period costumes, conceptually contained in the vanishing lines of a perspectival construction, and at the same time lined up in a row along the horizon line, traced in pencil via the succession of the six framed elements (at the viewer's eye level). The paper rectangles in different sizes scattered inside each of the elements and graduated from white to dark grey towards the edges – reproducing the background colour of the previous element each time – disperse the "radiating light" of Disegno geometrico towards the edges of the visual field.
The valet de chambre, taken from French eighteenth-century theatre iconography, introduced in 1983-84 in the form of a silhouette and since 1985 also used in a photographic version, presents 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 among 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 the group of works on the same theme that began in 1983-84 with Trionfo della rappresentazione (GPO-0507) and was developed in different formulations until 1987 (GPO-0539, GPO-0554, GPO-0562, GPO-0605).