L’arte e lo spazio. Quattro illustrazioni per uno scritto di Martin Heidegger (2), 1983

The work is part of a group of four variants from the same year (from GPO-0494 to GPO-0497), whose common denominator is a bound book of blank pages, open each time in a different position; to one quarter in the first case, halfway in the second, three-quarters of the way in the third, and completely open in the fourth. In the point where the book opens a double-page photographic spread presents an image of the book itself open in that position, with the cast of a hand and plaster fragments scattered in between the pages.1
In analogy with the photographic image, the book is integrated with several pieces of plaster – in the fourth version the cast of a hand is added as well – arranged in between the pages: “as if the process of writing (and reading) produced, page after page, a deposit of material (the text ponders and reflects on sculpture, as the place or eventuality itself of the form): until it confuses, dissolving the two elements, in other words, until it turns the text into sculpture",2 as the artist tells us.

1 The images reproduce the four plates that make up the print edition titled L’arte e lo spazio [Art and Space], published by Marco Noire in 1983, cf. GPE-0041.
2 G. Paolini in an unpublished and undated note, held in the artist’s archive.