Lezione di pittura, 1995

The two elements of different formats, placed vis-à-vis on two opposite walls, offer two situations that are complementary to each other. In the drawing framed by a white passepartout, a person immersed in thought is located at the edge of a room seen in perspective. In that room a cut-out at the centre evokes a painting hanging on the wall at the rear, between two doors. In the other element – whose black passepartout corresponds to the format of the cut-out of the white passepartout of the first element – the same room is repeated in a photographic version. The sitting figure is absent, and the "painting" in the middle is marked by a white paper square applied to the photograph.
A stand-in for the author, the figure seems to contemplate "his" painting – which in the game of combinations of frames remains a trace against the light, a fleeting hypothesis – awaiting inspiration or revelation.
The "lesson" mentioned in the title is meant to allude, according to the artist, to the impossibility of theorizing anything on painting: "I never taught a lesson on painting, because I never taught an art that no one believes they can learn".1
This work is part of a group of homonymous works, made between 1994 and 1998 (both as "paintings" and as works on paper), whose common denominator is the seated figure, holding his head in his hands.


1 G. Paolini, Lezione di pittura (Lugo [Ravenna]: Exit Edizioni, 1995), p. 9.