L’ARTISTA RINGRAZIA – Genealogies: the artistic and literary sources of Giulio Paolini

Since the beginning of his career, in the early 1960s, Giulio Paolini has nurtured his own research of confrontation with artistic and literary sources. An operating method that the artist has followed until today to claim belonging to a cultural and historical-artistic tradition, as well as to a dynasty of favorite authors. For the artist, in fact, authors from different eras are part of a circular temporality, typical of the nature and destiny of the work of art.

What conceptual devices are put in place? How are visual-artistic and literary sources acquired and transfigured? Who are the members of this ideal genealogy? How does the work take shape on an iconic and conceptual level? How are affinities and differences with past and contemporary artistic experiences manifested? These are the questions that the Study Day intends to address.

THURSDAY, JUNE 9

H10am

Greetings

Sergio Risaliti
Dirctor Museo Novecento, Firenze

Introduction
Bettina Della Casa
Director Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini, Torino

Moderator
Bettina Della Casa
Director Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini, Torino

Session I: The sources: models and transfigurations

Flavio Fergonzi
The tools of the historical-artistic tradition. Visual analysis and textual philology to understand Paolini’s work
The intervention introduces, with the presentation of some specific cases, the theme of the opportunities and limits of a traditional historical-artistic approach for understanding the work of Giulio Paolini. The artist, who has always lucidly reckoned with the precedents of the history of art, rather solicits interpretations that are extraneous to the field of discipline: with encroachments in aesthetics, philosophy, semiotics, linguistics. How close to the processes of Paolini’s invention does a close marking of his works, historically based on a visual basis? And how much helps a traditionally exegetical reading of the texts written by the artist? And, above all, how much escapes the heart of Paolini’s poetics with the application of these methodologies?

Claudio Zambianchi
With an eye to the past
Over the course of his long career, Giulio Paolini has played with the history of art, aware of the irreversibility of the great art of the past and also of its evocative power. The speech will focus on the use made by Paolini of fragments of painting and sculpture from antiquity to the eighteenth century, and will ask questions about the meaning it assumes in the artist’s work. Is it a quote, an object of meditation, or a flicker of vitality that emerged from the history of culture that the artist tries to revive and re-signify whenever he finds an opportunity for reflection in it?

Giuliano Sergio
Photographed and painted. The image of the author in some works by Giulio Paolini from the 1960s
“Photography is understood as the advent (and the consequent illusion) that decrees the (or the) end of photography and the origin of the image. More than a technique, it is therefore a real linguistic revelation ». This is how Giulio Paolini describes the function of photography in his work. Starting from the famous 1421965 (1965), the intervention will re-read some works by the artist from the second half of the 1960s that use photography, “memorable feats in space and time” that allowed Paolini to probe the figure of the author using all the linguistic potential of the medium and to favor, among the first, the entry of photography into contemporary art.

H2:30pm

Session II: Traveling companions: parallel events

Denis Viva
The subject reconvened. Giulio Paolini and some portraits of the past
Genealogy and portrait are intimately connected. Not only has this last genre, among the founding ones of art, configured over the centuries as an attestation of power and an implicit request for social recognition, but it has also become a form of legitimation based on the identification of lineages and kinship. Conceived as a function of a posthumous memory, the portrait was the testimony, at the same time, of a belonging (cultural, family, professional) and an exemplarity (civil, ethical, deontological) to be handed down to posterity as a memorable model. On the basis of this same exemplarity, at the end of the 1960s, the portrait – and especially the self-portrait – became in Italy an iconographic theme of metalinguistic exploration, in which artists began to probe the weight of their tradition and the topoi of the trade. Starting with some disruptive Pauline works of 1967, the recovery of self-portraits and portraits of the history of art thus turned into an expanded and intermediate practice (Salvo, Luigi Ontani, etc.) until reaching, in a converted form, painting postmodern. With what differences and peculiarities, however, did Giulio Paolini resort to portraits of the past? Two first considerations seem possible: first, instead of establishing stable diachronic genealogies, the portrait in Paolini highlights the reciprocity of the act of vision, of the paradoxical synchronic communication between gazes of different eras; secondly, precisely by virtue of this reciprocity, it seems to suggest rather an instability, temporal and extra-diegetic, which recalls the subject of the past with new means before the spectator of the present.

Roberta Minnucci
Conversations in plaster casts: the work of art between copy and fragment
The reading and reinterpretation of the Western sculptural tradition through the plaster cast have been at the center of the artistic research of Giulio Paolini and other contemporary artists, such as Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto, for several decades. Through the analysis of some particularly significant works for the topic under investigation, the contribution intends to analyze the fragment as a metaphor for an inaccessible past and an image of an unresolved contemporaneity within the specific Italian historical and artistic context of the years following the Second World War.
The sculptural fragments are used by the artists taken into consideration to refer to a divided and torn cultural identity, to a condition in the present that can draw on the past only through its scattered remains, claiming a continuity with the artistic tradition that preceded them and that survives through fragments suspended in time. If classical antiquity is a definitively lost dimension, it can be re-proposed in the present only as an imitation. The illusory nature of this attempt is, however, revealed by the fragmentary form in which this past presents itself. While the categories of originality and authenticity are being questioned, mirroring and reproduction devices become new interpretations for this same tradition. In the infinite repertoire of sculptures of an ideal plaster collection, these become sources to be duplicated and reinterpreted, dissected and destroyed in a revival of classical antiquity that investigates the very nature of art.

H2:30pm

Session IV: Literary echoes

Andrea Cortellessa
The invisible rivals. Paolini and Calvino, evolutions between the frames
As explained by the author since the release of the book, the figure of Giulio Paolini is foreshadowed in the character of the “sculptor Irnerio”, who appears in the third and then plays a substantial role in the seventh chapter of If a winter night a traveler, the “hyper-novel” that Italo Calvino published in June 1979. Up to now the studies have focused on the preparatory function – as a real “cartoon”, or rather conceptual “drawing” of the work – that carries out the critical text. squadratura, introduced by Calvino to the book by Paolini Idem, published in 1975 in the “Letteratura” series directed for Einaudi by Paolo Fossati. But the intervention will rather question the role of Irnerio’s character in the plot – or meta-plot – of Calvino’s novel; as well as on the exemplarity that the questions posed by the writer in La squadratura may have covered in the path that followed by Paolini himself.

Fabio Belloni
Giulio Paolini and Jorge Luis Borges
Among the many names of painters and writers continually invoked by Giulio Paolini, that of Jorge Luis Borges occupies a central role. The artist was an early reader of it, and from the very beginning he offered more evidence of his admiration. To J. L. B. (1965), Storia dell’eternità (1969), the double page for the catalog of the exhibition January 70 (1970), for example: for technical and expressive choice they are works very different from each other, which however find unity in the common appeal to the great Argentine. It is true that, especially in Italy, Borges was experiencing a formidable fortune: nevertheless Paolini showed too deep and lasting interest to suggest a simple reflection of that climate. He immediately recognized himself in him, finding continuous resources in his books. The absence of time and the value of the imagination, the vertigo of infinity and the suspension of waiting: these are the themes that fascinated him, contributing to the definition of his own poetics. What then are the actual readings of Paolini? And in what terms did you visually translate Borges? How does your passion fit into the artistic Italy of the time? The report will try to confront these questions, broadening the gaze to those who – thanks to the example of Paolini – made Borges a reference in their research between the 1960s and 1970s.

Elio Grazioli

The doubling: Giulio Paolini and Raymond Roussel
Paolini has dedicated three works to texts by the writer Raymond Roussel, since very early, in the mid-1960s, to then keep constant the reference to his figure throughout the decades of his artistic career, up to a very recent 2017. Author not very well known, especially in Italy, Roussel is a singular figure in many respects, a precursor misunderstood at the time of his publications, discovered only by the avant-garde of the first post-war period and never became popular due to its difficult reading, but also singular as a figure, neurotic and dandy at the same time . What Paolini found there is perfectly intertwined with his own work and one side of his attitude, that of the way of understanding the role of the artist and art, from the singular way of understanding self-referentiality and tautology to the “locus solus ”, As the probably most famous“ novel ”by Roussel, which is that of art and the artist, titled.