Giulio Paolini returns to Verona with an unprecedented project

From Oct. 15, 2023 to March 3, 2024, the Achille Forti Gallery of Modern Art in Verona will host Giulio Paolini’s previously unseen project, Et in Arcadia Ego, curated by Patrizia Nuzzo and Stefano Raimondi. The exhibition is the result of the first collaboration between the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti and Habitat, the section of ArtVerona (Oct. 13 to 15) that reconstructs immersive art environments; Paolini’s installation joins works by Gianni Colombo and Marinella Pirelli that will instead be exhibited in the spaces of the fair.

The artist thus returns to Verona: between 2001 and 2002 he had been the protagonist of an anthological exhibition at Palazzo Forti, the historic home of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna.

In Et in Arcadia Ego, which also gives the title to one of the works on display, Paolini intends to stage the visual narrative of an artist who confronts the “deceptions” of representation, such as copying, mimesis, and perspective, in favor of a conceptuality that renews the complex checkerboard of meanings around the work of art. Having lost its traditional centrality, the work is arranged in a scenic space in a kind of timeless “cradle,” in which the past lives in the present and is transformed into the future.

It is the titles of the works themselves that dictate the evolution of a narrative that begins with the author, dispossessed of himself and as if pervaded by an entity uncertain, walking down the Ladder of Reason, and continues with Copy and Original where the life-size plaster cast of a hand dialogues with the original and perfect form of the ostrich egg, in the uncertainty or inversion of its own identity.

In a context devoid of certainty, the artist investigates the traces of A Double Life in the symmetrical and contrary division of two halves of the same place. Ambiguity that is also reflected in From Dawn to Dusk, where the multiple possibilities and reasons for the existence of a work of art are evoked. These include The Model in Person, an emblematic yet mysterious inhabitant of an artist’s studio.

The focus of the habitat revolves around The Reappearance of the Virgin, which reinterprets The Apparition of the Virgin, a work dated 1995-1996 that is already in the civic collection of the Gallery of Modern Art. The work consists of two elements arranged one on the floor and the other in mid-air; on the floor is a photographic enlargement of Francis Picabia’s La Sainte Vierge, while suspended from the ceiling hangs the open case of a cello. Both elements allude to a potential revelation, to a sublime apparition: just as the sound of the absent instrument echoes from the case, so from the enigmatic ink blot emerges the drawing of a hypothetical and illegible image. On the occasion of Habitat, the work will be presented again in an expanded and amplified version.

For info: gam.comune.verona.it

Image: Giulio Paolini, The Model in Person (2020; photographic print applied to Dibond, easelettu, Plexiglas plate, plaster cast, globe, Plexiglas base; 240 x 210 x 155 cm). Photo by Luca Vianello, Turin. Courtesy Giulio and Anna Paolini Foundation. Credit Giulio Paolini.

Giulio Paolini returns to Verona with an unprecedented project

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