Giulio Paolini

The Artist

Galleria del Leone, Venice

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1970

Venice, Galleria del Leone, Giulio Paolini, September 1969

Exh. Cat., Milan, Fondazione Prada, Giulio Paolini 1960-1972, October – December 2003, p. 295, illustrated

Maddalena Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato, Tomo primo 1960-1982, Vol. I, Milan 2008, p. 194, no. 177, illustrated; and Vol. II, p. 915 (bibliography)

Michele Dantini, 'Gradus ad Parnassum. Giulio Paolini, "Autoritratto", 1969', Palinsesti Contemporary Italian Art On-line Journal, Vol. I, No. 2, 2001, pp. 1-11, illustrated, online (republished in: Michele Dantini, Geopolitiche dell'arte, Milan 2012, pp. 89-111, illustrated)

Michele Di Monte and Henri de Riedmatten, Eds., Tiziana Migliore, Ritratti 'portratti'. Giulio Paolini e l’identikit dell’artista, L’immagine che siamo. Ritratto e soggettività nell’estetica contemporanea, Rome 2014, p. 134

Paolo Emilio Antognoli Viti, Firenze 1977. Luciano Bartolini, Michael Buthe, Klaus vom Bruch, Martin Kippenberger, Marcel Odenbach, Anna Oppermann, Ulrike Rosenbach etc., Berlin 2015, pp. 136-137, illustrated

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a small speck of discolouration to the right of the figure's head. There are a few tiny specks of inpainting to the lower half of the figure, which fluoresce darker under ultra-violet light.
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Text by Maddalena Disch

The photographic canvas reproduces an illustration taken from a report on Istanbul published in an Italian magazine from that period. It depicts an elderly man wearing a white turban posing in front of a monumental building. The detail that caught Paolini’s eye, and led him to select the image, is the rectangular object that the unnamed man is carrying, which can be seen as a painting or as a portfolio of drawings. On this is based Paolini’s identification with the alleged artist, attested to by the designation of the work as a “self-portrait.”

The identification of the Eastern subject concerns neither his cultural identity nor his setting – the choice of the image is arbitrary – but rather the possibility of identifying with another artist (however much he may be presumed to be so and insignificant). Indeed, the work harks back to the artist’s famous Autoritratti (Self-Portraits) dated from 1968, which also comprise photographs reproduced on emulsion on canvas. In those self-portraits Paolini identified with Nicolas Poussin, specifically in his well-known 1650 self-portrait, and with Henri Rousseau holding his palette, visible instead in the self-portrait he made in 1890, respectively. If the identification at the time hinged on the artist’s desire to put forward not so much his actual real-life identity as his categorical one as an artist, thereby inscribing it in an elective line of art-historical belonging, in this case the aim to depersonalize is further emphasized by the choice of identifying with an individual who has no identity. Hence, the work foreshadows one made the following year, in which Paolini, by radicalizing further what he had previously developed, went so far as to sign all fourteen canvases of the work entitled Un quadro (A Painting) using wholly made up names.

Poised between the 1968 self-portraits – in turn created after the ones made in 1965 that portrayed the artist in the generic role of the painter engaged in moving or transporting a canvas, or while painting – and the works made in 1970, which are more explicitly conceptual and influenced by Paolini’s interest in the poetics of Jorge Louis Borges, the 1969 Autoritratto represents a curious work, one that is apparently peculiar and untypical, but that actually serves as a significant intermediate link in the artist’s research into the identity of the author.