Deposizione, 2018

On the ground a men's ceremonial outfit – complete with trousers, tails, waistcoat, shirt, collar, and gloves – with several white sheets of paper and a yellow cloth rose arranged in between the folds of the clothes is covered by a plexiglas case. An open suitcase hanging from the ceiling suggests the provenance of the items "deposited" on the floor.
In Paolini's universe the ceremonial outfit is a trace of the author who has left the scene to give the place of honour to the work and to the possibility of its manifesting itself: an expression, that is, of the "death of the author", of his abdication of his role as demiurge in favour of the triumph of the work and the theatre of the representation. The yellow rose is instead an elective attribute, taken from a tale by Jorge Luis Borges, A Yellow Rose, that tells the story of how the Italian poet Giambattista Marino, on his deathbed, realized the impossibility of transcribing what is real in verses. Paolini makes Marino's "deposition" (in the legal sense of the term) his own, in order to literally give shape to the impossibility of fixing in a definite form that absolute dimension that connotes the meaning of art – that invisible and ineffable something that the translucid case set down upon the dishevelled remains of the author seems to safeguard like an inaccessible trove.
A self-portrait in code, Deposizione is part of a line of descendance developed by Paolini starting in 1980 through a series of "portraits" of the author, which include in particular Incognita, 1979-80 (GPO-0438), La caduta di Icaro, 1981 (GPO-0464), Place des Martyrs, 1982-83 (GPO-0488), Tableau vivant, 1985 (GPO-0544, GPO-0552, GPO-0558), Identikit, 1987 (GPO-0509), Autoritratto come marionetta, 1992 (GPO-0692) and In esilio, 2012-14 (GPO-1039).