“It is as though the progress of the writing (and reading) produced, page after page, the material deposit of fragments of plaster (it is sculpture that the text considers and examines as the locus or indeed the possibility of form) to the point of dissolving and intermingling the two elements; in short, to the point of transforming the text into sculpture.”

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). 

L’arte e lo spazio. Quattro illustrazioni per uno scritto di Martin Heidegger (3) (Art and Space. Four Illustrations for a Paper by Martin Heidegger [3], 1983) is a bound book of blank pages held open by plaster fragments. The work is the third of four originals created by Paolini in the same year as illustrations for an Italian version of Martin Heidegger’s Die Kunst und der Raum (1969), an essay on sculpture and the enigmatic relationship between a sculpted body and the space it occupies and contains.⁴ The different versions are distinguished by the number of fragments holding the pages open and their position in the book, proceeding from a quarter of the way through to halfway, three quarters (the Cerruti version) and the end, as though to suggest the stages of reading through time. The fragments always succeed one another so as to culminate on a double page bearing a black and white photo of the blank book open in a position similar to that of the version in question. The photo of the Cerruti version presents a plaster hand on the right holding the book open three-quarters of the way through (fig. 2). In Paolini’s work, the German philosopher’s essay on sculpture tautologically becomes a tangible sequence of sculptural fragments of space inserted between the pages, almost as though the development of the written text were taking concrete shape in the act of reading. As the artist explains: “It is as though the progress of the writing (and reading) produced, page after page, the material deposit of fragments of plaster (it is sculpture that the text considers and examines as the locus or indeed the possibility of form) to the point of dissolving and intermingling the two elements; in short, to the point of transforming the text into sculpture.”⁵ Cerruti normally kept the work in the offices of his bookbinding firm on via Ludovico Bellardi in Turin. 

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.⁶ 

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 Heidegger 1983. Edition of 250 with four illustrations by Giulio Paolini and an introductory note by Gianni Vattimo. The four original plates were also published in a special edition of 50 copies entitled Giulio Paolini. Quattro tavole originali per L’arte e lo spazio di Martin Heidegger, Turin, 1983.

⁵ This undated note from the artist’s studio is presumably connected with a request from the collector.

⁶ 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.