Mimesi, 1976-88

Two plaster casts of the half-figure of the Hermes of Praxiteles are arranged opposite each other, just slightly staggered so that their gazes cross.
The exchange of gazes between the two identical figures questions the very reasons for the existence of the work and its coming into being by way of our gaze. In the artist's own more conceptual words: “The illusion that the artist has always pursued (transferring his image into another more significant and therefore less precarious one) is not entirely unwitting: the gaze fixed in a painting or in a sculpture does not address either the author or others, it does not admit either one or many points of view, it reflects within itself the question of its own presence”.1
The echo of an absent model and of a distant, mythical image, the cast represents a special tool used by the artist to enact the difference implicit in language, and therefore the very concept of mimesis. “The intent is to perceive – while leaving it intact – the distance that separates us from those images, but which, at the same time, makes them visible to us”,2 says the artist. “When I place two identical editions of the same antique sculpture one in front of the other it is not because I want to be the artificer or the rediscoverer of those sculptures; rather, my purpose is to be the observer who perceives the distance that separates them, hence, all the chances for a relationship or the lack of one that are determined between them, and between those images and ourselves". “This is not a revisitation meant as a choice from the warehouse of the past; my work is more of an undifferentiated welcome, a memory that wants to draw from the very making of the work”3.
The work is part of a group of variants developed in 1975-76, with the casts of other sculptural subjects (GPO-0283, GPO-0317, GPO-0318, GPO-0330).

1 G. Paolini, first publication on the invitation to the presentation of the multiple Mimesi at the Galleria Multipli, Turin, January 1976; republished among others in Giulio Paolini. Atto unico in tre quadri, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Studio Marconi (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta editore, 1979), p. 104.
2 G. Paolini interviewed by M. Bandini, in Tuttolibri, supplement to La Stampa (Turin), 22 June 1985; republished in Giulio Paolini. La voce del pittore – Scritti e interviste 1965-1995, edited by M. Disch (Lugano: ADV Publishing House, 1995), p. 221.
3 G. Paolini interviewed by F. Pasini, in L’Illustrazione italiana 5, no. 24 (Milan), November, 1985, p. 21; republished in Giulio Paolini. La voce del pittore, op. cit. (Lugano: 1995), p. 209.