Ennesima, 1975-88

From one to the other of the first sixteen sheets, a gradual reticular subdivision prevails over the automatic writing – a hypothetical description of the work itself – until it completely replaces the scriptural image and appears as a drawing, to ultimately, in the last twelve elements, achieve a completely black surface.
In the artist's own words: “Hence, three elements: the writing, the image, time. Each of them, however, is exhausted in its own nominal enunciation and, all together, they cannot be seen as constitutive. Writing, overlooking any form of communication, preserves nothing other than its appearance, it describes nothing other than itself. The drawing is the extreme limit of its own legitimacy, the definition of the surface of the page. Time suggests the pattern and determines, via the succession of the two elements that reveal it, the enigmatic measure of the story: it subtracts further truthfulness from both the writing and the drawing, it regulates their co-penetration in a constantly variable identity, multipliable to infinity, but unalterable by fate. The first page is already the last one, the last one is still the first, the sequence moves from one equal towards an equal. Here, then, is the neutrality of a dynamic that, again via the use of the same elements, achieves none other than its own infinitesimal development. The title Ennesima [Umpteenth], in fact, is meant to recall the possibility of elevation ad infinitum of this process. As if to say that it is perhaps not so obvious to establish that the figurative, visual dimension, is born as a pure and simple image, and that it may instead have the implicit and intimate need to describe itself, the vocation to find another more definitive form of itself”.1
The theme of Ennesima was conceived in 1972-73 with several works on paper, which originated from the painting Appunti per la descrizione di un quadro datato 1972 (1972, GPO-0238). It was later worked on further in two versions on canvas (1973 and 1975, GPO-0255 and GPO-0297), in a print edition (1975, GPE-0017) and in a variant of twelve elements made in 1987 (GPO-0628). A further reformulation of this more extensive version dates to the solo exhibition hosted by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, where it constituted one of the various works developed in length to form the friezes installed at the top of the wall of the display space.

1 G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. Atto unico in tre quadri, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Studio Marconi (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta editore, 1979), p. 107.