Almost Giulio Paolini, 1999

On the occasion of the IV edition of Arte all’Arte, the curators Florian Matzner and Angela Vettese invited Giulio Paolini to participate, who chose the Pinacoteca of Volterra for his intervention.

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Giulio Paolini chose the Pinacoteca of Volterra as the site for his intervention, where masterpieces of Italian art from the Middle Ages and Mannerism are preserved: an altarpiece by Rosso Fiorentino, in particular, in which Christ's flesh appears green like in surrealist paintings and the volumes of the figures are so geometric that they anticipate Cubism by centuries, makes the Pinacoteca a particularly fitting place to express impotence and go beyond.

Paolini expresses his state of aphasia through the display of symbolic white sheets: alabaster slabs, a material chosen among those characteristic of Volterra and therefore a tribute to local traditions, but also suitable for being penetrated by light and thus permeable, open, waiting to receive marks just like the blank pages of poets and the empty canvases of painters.

A square slab hovers at the center of the courtyard of the pinacoteca, swaying on its midpoint, as if it were about to descend or rise above a base also made of alabaster: a pure and white parallelepiped that alludes to the art of sculpture; even the empty base seems to be waiting for an object to rest upon it—or perhaps, instead, orphaned from the sculpture it once supported.

On the third floor, in the cloister, the steel cables that support the slabs outline four vertical planes, while those that meet at the center outline a horizontal plane orthogonal to the other four. The intersection of these latter cables at the center of the cloister holds a cluster of colored pencils, as if they were arrows ready to strike the pages but not yet released. This further confirms how the five pages and the base define a void: the work is not yet completed—or perhaps can never be completed. Hence its title, Quasi. Yet at the same time, the alabaster slabs, the pencils, the base, the three-dimensional squaring of the space achieved through the wire all constitute a presence, a starting point, a sign of trust; in short, a work all the more paradoxical the more it speaks of the impossibility of making a work.

The work consists precisely in this: in designing the present and the future also on the physical basis of the past, commenting on it and projecting it forward, bearing witness to how the individual artist, but also humanity in general, neither knows how nor can abandon the language of visual art. Rather than considering it concluded, they continue to investigate its skeleton or, if preferred, its structure.

Florian Matzner and Angela Vettese, Arte all'Arte IV, 1999