The Ebla series consists of panels painted with oils to simulate marble with small fragments of colour photographs - described by Paolini as the “soul pre-existing in the material and destined to reveal itself as work of art”- emerging from the veins. 

Giulio Paolini’s works are like mirrors through which art reflects on itself and its material and theoretical structures. Each work is envisaged from the outset as part of an endless series that includes those preceding it and foreshadows those to come with the artist as privileged observer. Paolini’s first documented work is Disegno geometrico (1960). Described by the artist as a “picture that is announced but never accomplished”,¹ it consists of a length of burlap painted with a mixture of zinc white and Vinavil and drawn upon with black and red ink. As Paolini informed Germano Celant in 1972, the work is essentially the “choice to copy on a canvas, in the correct proportion, the preliminary drawing for any drawing, that is, the geometric squaring of the surface”.² He went on in 1973 to explain that his work strives for “absolute images inherent in the very nature of the canvas and the employment of an elementary technique: tempera, ink and so on (the geometric squaring of the pictorial surface, the monochrome ground, the tracing of a sheet of graph paper, the design of a letter, a chromatic scale).”³ His focus on the material basis of artistic creation extends to the places peculiar to it, such as the studio and the exhibition space, museum or gallery, as conditions through which art is made and presented. Citations are logically a recurrent feature of Paolini’s work. Developing an inexhaustible series and repositioning his works in new contexts, the artist uses fragments drawn from the great catalogue of the history of art, identifying time as a suspended situation actualised in a renewed present. While the subjects Paolini explores place him among the forerunners of the work carried out in the sphere of conceptual art at the international level, he also stands out among the pioneers of the Arte Povera movement in virtue of his radical approach. The Cerruti Collection includes two of the artist’s works: Ebla (1976-77) and L’arte e lo spazio. Quattro illustrazioni per uno scritto di Martin Heidegger (3) (1983). 

The first is one of a group of sixteen works whose general title Ebla is the name of an ancient city in northern Syria and means “white rock”, a reference to the geological formation of the surrounding terrain. Long buried and forgotten, it was the site of major excavations undertaken as from 1975 by Italian archaeological missions. News of this aroused Paolini’s interest and led him to connect the idea of rediscovery with Michelangelo’s wellknown conception of the form already present in the marble being freed by the sculptor’s hand. The Ebla series consists of panels painted with oils to simulate marble with small fragments of colour photographs - described by Paolini as the “soul pre-existing in the material and destined to reveal itself as work of art”⁴ - emerging from the veins. Carried out by a skilled craftsman, the faux marble effect recalls a technique already known in ancient Rome and especially in the First or Incrustation Style of Pompeian painting, where it was used to adorn rooms without incurring the expense of real stone. The Ebla panels are distinguished from one another by the colour of the faux marble, the positioning of the photographic details and their subject matter. The Cerruti painting presents a predominance of greenish blue shades and an arrangement of one photographic element in each corner and three in the middle. While the corner elements are parts of a photo of a stately interior with marble panels and decorations, a detail of a white marble statue against a wall of dark green marble appears in the centre (fig. 1). An ancient painting with a dark patina can be seen on the wall. Identifiable as belonging to photos of rooms and masterpieces of the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the specific fragments of the Cerruti Ebla therefore refer to works located in their specific exhibitive context.⁵ As the artist explains: “Symbolically, the fragments suggest that a room in a museum can be glimpsed through a crack in a piece of marble.”⁶ 

Among the most recent works in the collection, the presence of Ebla and L’arte e lo spazio documents the broadening of Cerruti’s interests up to the contemporary period. While Paolini was not aware of their purchase, these works shed light on relations between members of the two families. As a commercial agent for a number of paper mills, the artist’s father Angelo Paolini was in professional contact with the offices of the Lit and met Cerruti a number of times in person. Their common Ligurian origins - or “Genoesity”, as Paolini put it - soon turned this working relation into a closer understanding and led to friendly contact between the mothers of the collector and the artist, who were not, however, directly involved.⁷ 

Marcella Beccaria

¹ G. Paolini, (unpublished text), 2003, in Milan 2003a, p. 261.

² Celant 1972, p. 15. For Disegno geometrico, see also Belloni 2019, where a connection is identified between the work and an illustration from Cesare Torricelli, Disegno Geometrico e Geometria Grafica (pp. 27ff, Turin, 1943), a technical manual in the artist’s library inherited from his brother Cesare.

³ G. Paolini, “Note di lavoro”, in Milan 2003a, p. 38.

⁴ From a conversation between the artist and M. Disch, October 2001, in Disch 2008, p. 365.

⁵ I wish to thank Fabio Cafagna for identifying the subjects photographed, which comprise the Bernini David (1623-24), Guido Reni’s Moses with the Tables of the Law, and details from the rooms containing Bernini’s Aeneas and Anchises and Canova’s iconic Paolina Borghese.

⁶ Conversation with the artist, Turin, 3 September 2020.

⁷ Conversation with the artist, Turin, 3 September 2020. Paolini recalls visiting Villa Cerruti at the beginning of this century to see the collection together with Ida Gianelli. We thank Bettina Della Casa of the Studio Giulio Paolini and Maddalena Disch of the Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini for the valuable information provided.