Chiaroscuro, 1997-98
GPO-0817
Frames with passepartout-like cropped photo prints and crumpled photo prints, marble columns
Two framed parts 120 x 120 cm each, two columns 270 x 41 x 41 cm each, overall dimensions site-specific
Obayashi Corporation Tokyo Head Office, Shinagawa Intercity Tower B, Tokyo
The intervention conceived for waiting room 4 on the twenty-ninth floor of the office building owned by the Japanese client includes two framed elements, displayed at the centre of the two opposite walls, and a pair of black marble columns (one upside down, the other right side up) placed before a panoramic window. Paolini also suggested the furnishings for the space: white walls, black floor and ceiling, a square glass table and four black Le Corbusier armchairs.
The two photographs which are cut out so that they resemble passepartouts each contain the central part of the other element, crumpled up, so that each one integrates the other, without, however, producing a fulfilled image.
In the artist's own words: “A black stain on a blank page (La Sainte Vierge by Francis Picabia, a variant that was not used on page 3 of issue no. XII of 391, March 1920). A white stain against a black sky (from a photograph by Paolo Mussat Sartor reproducing an explosion of fireworks during the night). Two images: the first one frames the second one, and vice versa (that is: two different versions of the same image)".1
The pair of photographic elements reproduces, with slight variants and in a larger format, the version of Chiaroscuro made the year before (GPO-0814): in this case the image of the Sainte Vierge is upside down, and that of the fireworks is a different one.
1 G. Paolini, unpublished note, 1997.
Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vierge II, 1920, Indian ink on paper, Bibliothèque Doucet, Paris.
| • | A Collaboration between Architecture and Contemporary Art (Tokyo: Obayashi Corporation Head Office Project Catalog, 1999), p. 31, col. repr. pp. 31-32. |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 2 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 817 p. 838, col. repr. |
| • | Obayashi Corporation Art Project Catalog, DVD edited by Nanjo and Associates (Tokyo: Obayashi Corporation Corporate Communications Department, 2013), digital reprint of the 1999 catalogue, erroneously dated "1988"). |
