Mnemosine (Les Charmes de la Vie/9), 1981-88

Mnemosine (Les Charmes de la Vie) is the general title of a cycle of works, initially designed to contain nine episodes (an analogy with the number of the letters contained in the name Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses), but in the end condensed into just six parts (GPO-0460, GPO-0504, GPO-0511, GPO-0599, GPO-0621, GPO-0677). A common denominator is the presence of one or more paintings, reproducing the details of Jean-Antoine Watteau's painting entitled Les Charmes de la Vie (1717-18). The canvases, commissioned by Paolini from a scenic painter, comprise the division into nine equal parts of an enlarged copy of the eighteenth-century painting, absent the figures that originally filled it. From one work to the other, the artist associated to the details of the painting a corresponding number of objects: for instance, he added two elements to the second detail, seven elements to the seventh detail, and so on and so forth. From one station to another, the principal elements making up the spatiality of Watteau's painting – sky, chair, columns, floor – are staged in echoes and amplifications, in declaredly theatrical terms in harmony with the register used by the French painter.
In the fifth work, two pairs of valets are reproduced in tempera in life-size form, and contained in the room drawn in perspective on a long wall. Each of them holds the ends of a sequence of nine primed canvases, arranged at regular intervals at the viewer's eye level. The dimensions of the canvases are the same as Paolini's first painting, Disegno geometrico, 1960 (GPO-0001), the conceptual paradigm of his poetics. In the central part of the work the horizon line overlaps a row of nine larger canvases, propped up against the wall: in the foreground to the right is a painted canvas with the ninth detail from Watteau's painting (lower right corner), while in the other rows the canvases are reversed, some of them turned vertically, others, horizontally. Just as the entire Mnemosine cycle disperses the image of Watteau's painting via the various stages it is made up of, the reversed canvases allow the viewer to imagine the other details of the eighteenth-century painting, while the horizon line constituted by blank canvases disperses the vision of a painting on the threshold of the space of the representation.
Indeed, it is not the intention of the nine stations in the cycle to gradually put the puzzle of the old master work back together; on the contrary, its purpose is to disperse its interpretation by evoking the individual details as if in a ciphered game. From one episode to another, Watteau's scene becomes a stage that by definition opens up a painting before the gaze of the person overlooking its threshold: the space of the representation, with its artifices and its intimate theatricality.