Capitemi!, 1966

Six elements arranged in a circle in the corner of a room constitute the succession, in a complementary manner and clockwise of: a photographic canvas with an image of the artist holding a blank canvas,1 a blank canvas, an overturned canvas, a sheet of polyethylene stretched over a stretcher, a monochrome photographic canvas in sepia, and, lastly, an overturned photographic canvas that reproduces the initial image but in its negative version.
Capitemi represents the research that the artist interweaves from one work to another, weighing up the endless hypotheses of imagining a painting by way of a circular path that is constantly being renewed. “Wandering around this image of the painter in every working pose possible – Paolini remarks – is also somewhat justified by my remaining firm vis-à-vis a known technique, the usual materials, a specific working system. And so perhaps also in part corresponding to the use of traditional materials is the falling back, whenever an image needs to be obtained for the painting, on the figure of the painter who is seeking the image with which to bestow it".2 The title (“Understand me!”), the artist remarks, is meant to evoke "not without irony a cry for help by the 'misunderstood' painter".3

1 This is a detail from a photograph making up the work 1421965 (GPO-0076).
2 G. Paolini interviewed by C. Lonzi, in Collage 7 (Palermo), May, 1967, p. 46; republished in C. Lonzi, Scritti sull'arte (Milan: Et al./Edizioni, 2012), p. 525.
3 G. Paolini in conversation with M. Disch (2001), in M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 112 p. 138. On the invitation card for the 1967 solo show in Turin, where the work was shown for the first time, Paolini had the title printed backwards, as if it were being pronounced by the figure that was upside down.