Mnemosine (Les Charmes de la Vie/8), 1981-90

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 last work chronologically speaking, the eighth detail of the painting is associated with eight stretchers and a primed canvas, on which a pencil drawing evokes eight elements revolving around a central pivot. Five stretchers are amassed in different positions up against the wall and against the painted canvas, in an upside-down position, while three canvases are lying on the ground. The small primed canvas is hanging at the viewer's eye level, fastened to the first of the stretchers so that it serves as a "pivot" of the disassembled ensemble of elements.
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.