Senza titolo, 1964

The work made for the solo exhibition in Rome in 1964, and later dismembered, comprised a plywood panel propped up against a wall from which a chain with a hook hanged down – of the kind used at the time to hang paintings – identifying the work as a "wall" on which the "painting" was missing.
The work is part of the research that distinguishes the artist's output in 1964, characterized by simple plywood panels that when placed on the ground or hung from the wall, in the artist's words, “‘replaced’ the presence of pictures on the walls and analyzed the purely conventional rapports of an exhibition” (1973).1 By expanding the gesture that merely suggests the possible vision of a painting, chosen by Paolini from the very outset as a paradigm of his own exploration, these works pave the way to the question that the painting raises at the moment of its exhibition and therefore its perception.

1 G. Paolini, "Note di lavoro", in NAC 3 (Milan), March, 1973, p. 10. Cf. also Paolini's letter to Plinio De Martiis on 4 July 1964, in which, after critical considerations with respect to the triumph of Pop Art at the 1964 Venice Biennale, the artist reveals in advance to the Roman art dealer the project of his own exhibition in these terms: "My ‘exhibition’, once the Biennale ends, will finally be an explicit representation, a definitive one, of the current situation, and the intention is already there to direct my activity towards a state of simply ‘being’, with no further mediations, expedients, or any other type of aesthetic accessories" (manuscript in the Archivio di Stato di Latina, La Tartaruga Collection, Folder 26).