Arianna, 2025

The reversed canvas features a torn image of the female figure of Antonio Canova’s Funeral Stele of Giovanni Falier. In the trajectory of her gaze, a linear radial pattern, traced in red ink, overlaps two other images, askew of each other, reproducing a photographic view of the entrance hall of the artist’s home and an architectural plate, taken from a seventeenth-century handbook on perspective.1 Up against the two perspectival images is a white rectangle, half of which is inserted in the view of the entrance hall, the other half continuing in pencil on the architectural drawing.
The painting without a face, the vanishing point of the architectural drawing that stands out due to the red spoke-like pattern, and the view of the atrium (an empty room or stage set up to host unpredictable appearances): this is a prelude to or preparation for the wait, with neither an end nor a beginning, of the vision. The author explains that this is also how the title should be interpreted, which alludes to the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, "in which often appears the statue of Ariadne, a figure who eternally waits to capture an image”.2

1 The colour image dates to the portfolio Contemplator enim, 1991 (cf. GPE-080). The seventeenth-century plate by Jan Vredeman de Vries has often been used by Paolini, starting from the 1976 print Senza titolo (GPE-0026) and particularly since 2008 (cf. among the works on paper GPC-1116, GPC-1792, GPC-1289, GPC-1644, GPC-1793, GPC-2279, GPC-2361). The canvas, which had already been used in the work Qui e ora (Roma, 15 febbraio 2013), 2013 (GPO-1026), dates back to the cycle of works titled L'ospite, initiated in 1989 (cf. GPOP-0643), hence the presence on the recto of a photograph tinted in blue.
2 G. Paolini in conversation with M. Disch, 5 June 2025.