Giulio Paolini. Era finora

Bilingual edition Ita/Eng

Giulio Paolini’s production is a metaphysical reflection on the artistic creative process. In fact, Paolini believes that the work already exists in some way, before the  intervention of the artist, who is simply the first to contemplate it. This publication is devoted to Paolini’s site-specific intervention for the Fondazione Luigi Rovati Art Museum and is part of a new series of monographs on important contemporary artists who have collaborated with the Foundation.  Entitled Era finora, Paolini’s work is composed of two plaster heads in profile, one female and the other male. They evoke, respectively, the classical and neoclassical: the origin of the Western canon of art and of its revival at the dawn of the contemporary era. Framed by a display case, the faces seem to measure the perimeter of a space or to mark a path, like milestones.

Their gaze traces a perspective accented by superimposed photographic reproductions: a kind of “portrait gallery”, a continuum of images that mark the history of man and art. The images move between past and present, as testimonies of times and spaces that are distant yet present in the here and now of viewing the work.
Art history is an automatic reference for Paolini, for whom there is no difference between antique and contemporary art. All art is equal, being the investigation of the world through vision as a mental act. The time of art is that of the work, not of its creator: when the life of the artists, be they Etruscan, Greek or of the Renaissance, is over, the indefinite present of the work remains.