Senza titolo, 1961

A primed canvas unnailed from its original stretcher and trimmed on three sides is visibly stitched to a slightly larger stretcher, while a transparent polyethylene sheet covers the whole in the manner of a canvas stretched across a stretcher.
The work is part of the artist's study on the relationship between the support and an object that is conventionally preliminary to or implicit in the realization of a painting. In the artist's words: "The goal was to come to terms with the painting vis-à-vis what the idea of the picture could stimulate or suggest. Indeed, in the sense of trying to grasp the reason for the physical presence of the picture as an object. […] It was the attempt to provide a work with a form, without the humiliation of seeing it completed. Without the intimidating burden of its meaning".1
The work was replicated in another version from the same year that is distinguished by slight differences in size and in certain material details, such as the knots in the stretcher and the stitching (GPO-0009).

1 G. Paolini interviewed by N. Orengo, in Fuoricampo 1, no. 2 (Turin), June, 1973, p. 5; republished in Giulio Paolini. La voce del pittore – Scritti e interviste 1965-1995, edited by M. Disch (Lugano: ADV Publishing House, 1995), p. 165.