Album (III), 2006

Nine elements placed at short intervals produce a perspective drawing of a table, with a half-closed sketchbook placed upright, emerging from which are various sheets that fall freely to the floor. Two torn pages, which seem to come from the sketchbook, reproduce in the original language the story Una rosa amarilla (A Yellow Rose) by Jorge Luis Borges. The first page is accompanied by the drawing of a rose, added to which are several photographic fragments of a yellow rose applied to the second page, while other details of the same image are scattered across the sheet outlined on the table.
In between the book and the pages falling to the floor, the announcement of a work is overturned in its unfufillment: on the worktable, the wait for an unknown image that the author renews from one work to another is consumed in the ascertainment of its inevitable disintegration the moment it seems to manifest itself.
Just like the aforementioned short story by Borges, in which the poet Giambattista Marino, on his death bed, as he observes a yellow rose realizes that it is impossible to express its elusive essence.1
The work is part of a series of four homonymous works made that same year, distinguished by the progressive numbering in the title and the growing number of framed elements (GPO-0939, GPO-0940, GPO-0941, GPO-0942).

1 In the emblematic story, repeatedly referred to by Paolini in his writings and in his works, “Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents. Marino achieved that epiphany on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well” (J. L. Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 310).