Vedo (la decifrazione del mio campo visivo: versione Mon seul désir), 1971-84

A multitude of fragments from a colour reproduction of the tapestry of the Lady and the Unicorn (accompanied by the inscription “Mon seul désir”, referred to by Paolini in the title of his work), are disseminated on a wall interrupted by a central passage, to retrace the elliptical area corresponding to the visual field of both the author and the viewer. Moreover, the ellipse also traces the shape of the ideal island, which hosts the various representations of the cycle of Renaissance tapestries held at the Musée des Thermes et de l’Hôtel de Cluny in Paris.
The work harkens back to the first “deciphering” of his visual field, realized by the artist in 1969 via a profusion of dots marked on the wall (cf. Vedo (la decifrazione del mio campo visivo), GPO-0188). As Paolini declared at the time, "Vedo is the abstract and conceptual scheme of the vision, the translation in figures of the phenomenon of seeing".
The same theme was formulated, with other torn fragments, in a previous version on canvas (GPO-0276), while in 2016 it was reproduced in a variant on the wall with fragments of a star chart (GPO-1051), and in 2018 with a series of squares and rectangles drawn on the wall (GPO-1068).