Un quadro, 1970

Un quadro was conceived as a group of fourteen photo canvases all of which bear the black and white image of Giulio Paolini’s first work, Disegno geometrico (1960, GPO-0001), however, signed and titled each time on the verso with the name of a fictitious author and an imaginary title. The ink inscriptions at the left of the upper stretcher bar, read as follows: “Edgar Bogojawlensky / Amore e Psiche”, “Estelle Masselin / Orto botanico”, “Evert Palme / Il ponte dell’Arsenale a Venezia”, “José Alfonso Berkeley / Apparizione”, “Ahmed Barka / Mercato tunisino”, “Arabella Florio Stewart / Interno a Mirabeau”, “Mehemet Kalahari / Zorah”, “Arcadio Llorente / “Illusion perdue”, “David Knowles / Gustaham decapita Farshidward”, “Jacques Louis Morel / Cigno trasformato in cigno”, “Orlando De Luna / Figura astratta”, “Donna Harrison / Prospect park”, “François Philidor / Equivalents”, “Augusto Bonghi / Immagine di un dialogo”.1 The multiplication of the image of Disegno geometrico and its association with various authors expands and confirms the universal value of that first work, further developing a conceptual reflection on the identity of a painting, its interpretation, its definition, its author.
“With Un quadro I wanted to attribute to my first work a certain universal nature, that is, to cause to stem from that moment not just my subsequent work, but also a sort of incontrovertible value of the same image”,2 the artist affirms. Elsewhere, again in reference to Disegno geometrico as cited in Un quadro, Paolini remarks: “The impossibility of the definition (because that painting is that painting, its potential extension or reduction), the endless interpretative equivalences of a dimension that is nonetheless always the same (the categorical existence of the painting as such)”.3 As part of the first presentation of Un quadro in Milan in 1971, Paolini instead wrote as follows in the catalogue: “Un quadro, painted in 1960, transcends the residual meaning of this text. No one can describe a picture. Two pictures, at times, reveal a painter to himself. Can a picture describe a picture? If I were able to imagine the future of art, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from what it looks like at present. I might think, therefore, that I had already imagined it, but the hypothesis would be so impulsive as to convince me to coincide with the past. If art has no future, and it obviously has no past, then in the present it has nothing other than the illusion of these two terms.”4
Omitting the signature and date from the canvases of Un quadro, thus favouring a state of switched identity, has to do with Paolini's interest in Jorge Luis Borges, which first began around 1970, also visible in other works from that same year.
Un quadro has never been displayed in its entirety. In the first exhibitions of the work the artist showed from six to eight editions. In 2003, on the occasion of his solo show at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, Paolini included four canvases in a pattern of rectangles drawn on the wall, ten of which were completely outlined – thus recalling, along with the four paintings, the fourteen original works – while the others remained open towards the exterior and thus incomplete. In 2018, for a group show in Florence, the artist instead conceived a wall drawing with rectangles arranged haphazardly, so that they recalled the other editions of Un quadro, or a further, potentially unlimited multiplication of the same image.

1 The names of the authors and relative titles which were formulated by playfully combining the names of people and places, and the titles of literary works and paintings, are in part implicitly linked to personal references, and in part to rhetorical word games. An example of this is “Arabella Florio Stewart”, which comes from the name Alexandra Stewart, one of the artist’s favourite actresses at the time, while the title “Interno a Mirabeau” [Interior in Mirabeau] refers to a small house in Southern France that Paolini would have liked to purchase, but couldn’t afford. “Ahmed Barka” cites two typical Arabic names, while the title “Mercato tunisino” [Tunisian Market] evokes the painting by Wassily Kandinsky Blue Rider in Tunisian Market. Similarly, “Mehemet Kalahari” combines an Arabic name with that of a savannah in Southern Africa, while the title “Zorah” alludes to the girl portrayed by Matisse in some of the masterpieces he made during his Morocco period. “Arcadio Llorente” combines the utopian Arcadia with the Spanish adjective that means “weeping”, while the related title, “Illusion perdue” alludes to the title of Balzac’s novel Les Illusions perdues [Lost Illusions] (1837-43).
2 G. Paolini in G. Celant, Giulio Paolini (New York: Sonnabend Press, 1972), pp. 94-95 (revised translation, republished in Giulio Paolini 1960-1972, edited by G. Celant [Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2003], p. 294), reprint (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2019), pp. 94-95.
3 G. Paolini in Note di lavoro, in the version published in Id., Idem (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1975), p. 43, new edition (Milan: Electa, 2023), p. 69. On several occasions Paolini joined this phrase with the words that follow in this entry.
4 G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. Un quadro, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Galleria dell’Ariete, 1971, n. pag.