Scena muta (stanza dell’autore), 1998-99

Sixteen canvases – ten seen from the recto six from the verso – and sixteen squares of the same size drawn on the wall, along with thirty-two empty units, form a pattern of sixty-four squares, the same number as the “places” on a chessboard. The central canvases of the two lower orders depict in pencil a life-size reproduction of the draughtsman portrayed in the colour reproduction applied to the verso of the reversed canvas located just above it, as if the figure itself – taken from the painting Un jeune écolier qui dessine (1733-34) by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin – were copying its own image from life.1
Akin to Chardin’s draughtsman, seated on the ground, the male figure is drawn on the bottom rows of canvases, but unlike the eighteenth-century model, who wears period clothing and busily copies a real subject, here he is wearing contemporary clothing and is reproducing the chessboard that makes up the work itself. A wooden set square, placed inside the reversed canvas in the bottom row, and a series of drawings of permutations of squares and lozenges, scattered across the wall so that they overlap the units of the drawn pattern further connote the figure represented as the artist’s stand-in.
The “silent scene” – mentioned in the title – is set in the “author’s room”, that is, in the place that presides over the birth of a work. The draughtsman intent on outlining the chessboard of the work itself proposes the very making of the work in the here and now of its exhibition. In the artist’s own words: “the work visualizes the clues that reveal to us its gradual coming into being”.1

1 G. Paolini in conversation with M. Disch (2007), in M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 2 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 826 p. 848.