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Lot Essay
"When I put two identical examples of the same ancient sculpture one in front of the other, I do not wish to be the creator or discoverer of these sculptures, I want to be the observer who sees the distance that divides them and therefore captures all the possibilities of relationship or absence of relationship between that image and us." (Giulio Paolini cited in Arte Povera, exh. cat., London, 1999, p. 135.)
Mimesi is widely regarded as one of Paolini'’s finest and most memorable works. Executed between 1975 and 1976, it is perhaps the simplest and most eloquent expression of the central theme of Paolini's art: the act of seeing. Consisting of two life-size plaster casts of the Medici Venus that have been positioned so as to face each other, a mystery is set up at the centre of the work. It is a mystery expressed by a void, by the pregnant emptiness of the space between the two gazing figures.
As in his famous photocopied portrait A Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto, where Paolini visually opens to question the act of seeing and of looking at an art object by exposing the inconsistencies in the way in which we look at interpret things according to their context, in Mimesi, the two Venuses seem to stare at each other across a temporal divide. But instead of the young man staring at the viewer through the painted image of him staring at Lorenzo Lotto, in Mimesi the two figures are caught in an enclosed narcisstic obsession with each other'’s image - an image which is also of course an image of the self. In this way Mimesi goes further than A Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto in its exploration of the way the work of art is perceived, in that through its reflexivity the work of art has become self-contained. The act of seeing bounces endlessly and independently from the viewer between the two figures, and in this way, to some degree, the viewer is excluded. The artist too has been to some extent excluded, for as Paolini observed about this work, "The illusion the artist has always pursued (projecting his own image on to another more significant and therefore less precarious one) is hardly accidental: the gaze fixed in a painting or a sculpture is addressed to neither the artist nor to others, admits neither one nor several points of view, reflects in itself the question of its own existence."
Mimesi reflects this aspect of the creation and viewing of a work of art by internalising all these issues and framing them. They are now contained within the empty space that exists between the two staring statues. In this way, as Craig Owens has written, the notion of the dematerialisation of the art object that was so central to much of the artistic thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the question of objectivity on behalf of the artist and the viewer, is resolved in one simple poetic and potent double image.
"Giulio Paolini's art invariably stages a (double) disappearance - both of the art object itself, which has been reduced to the status of a fragment or trace, as well as the subject who can claim the object as his, as one of the modes of his vision, his thought... What we encounter in Paolini's installations is never the thing itself, but a stand-in or replacement for it (the lost object, the object of desire); hence, the plaster casts of antique statuary out of which so many of his works are composed, or the wall drawings which often double either for the objects exhibited in the gallery space or the space itself. The disappearance of the subject, in Paolini, the 'dematerialization of art', its removal from the circuits of appropriation and consumption, entails a dispossession - the death of the artist. ( I am referring of course to Roland Barthes' famous post-mortem 'The Death of the Author', in which Barthes argues that the author cannot - or can no longer - claim to be the unique source or meaning and/or value of the work of art.) For Paolini... the work of art is an essentially narcissistic structure which returns neither the artist's nor the viewer's gaze. In Mimesi - which remains for me Paolini's most powerful work - he deploys, with his customary elegance and economy, two identical plaster casts of an antique Venus pudica mirror images, exchanging gazes into infinity. An image of fulfilled desire - the narcissistic desire for our own image that motivates our looking at works of art - Mimesi radically excludes both artist and viewer in the name of its own internal completion." (C. Owens, Giulio Paolini, exh. cat., New York, 1987.)
Mimesi is widely regarded as one of Paolini'’s finest and most memorable works. Executed between 1975 and 1976, it is perhaps the simplest and most eloquent expression of the central theme of Paolini's art: the act of seeing. Consisting of two life-size plaster casts of the Medici Venus that have been positioned so as to face each other, a mystery is set up at the centre of the work. It is a mystery expressed by a void, by the pregnant emptiness of the space between the two gazing figures.
As in his famous photocopied portrait A Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto, where Paolini visually opens to question the act of seeing and of looking at an art object by exposing the inconsistencies in the way in which we look at interpret things according to their context, in Mimesi, the two Venuses seem to stare at each other across a temporal divide. But instead of the young man staring at the viewer through the painted image of him staring at Lorenzo Lotto, in Mimesi the two figures are caught in an enclosed narcisstic obsession with each other'’s image - an image which is also of course an image of the self. In this way Mimesi goes further than A Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto in its exploration of the way the work of art is perceived, in that through its reflexivity the work of art has become self-contained. The act of seeing bounces endlessly and independently from the viewer between the two figures, and in this way, to some degree, the viewer is excluded. The artist too has been to some extent excluded, for as Paolini observed about this work, "The illusion the artist has always pursued (projecting his own image on to another more significant and therefore less precarious one) is hardly accidental: the gaze fixed in a painting or a sculpture is addressed to neither the artist nor to others, admits neither one nor several points of view, reflects in itself the question of its own existence."
Mimesi reflects this aspect of the creation and viewing of a work of art by internalising all these issues and framing them. They are now contained within the empty space that exists between the two staring statues. In this way, as Craig Owens has written, the notion of the dematerialisation of the art object that was so central to much of the artistic thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the question of objectivity on behalf of the artist and the viewer, is resolved in one simple poetic and potent double image.
"Giulio Paolini's art invariably stages a (double) disappearance - both of the art object itself, which has been reduced to the status of a fragment or trace, as well as the subject who can claim the object as his, as one of the modes of his vision, his thought... What we encounter in Paolini's installations is never the thing itself, but a stand-in or replacement for it (the lost object, the object of desire); hence, the plaster casts of antique statuary out of which so many of his works are composed, or the wall drawings which often double either for the objects exhibited in the gallery space or the space itself. The disappearance of the subject, in Paolini, the 'dematerialization of art', its removal from the circuits of appropriation and consumption, entails a dispossession - the death of the artist. ( I am referring of course to Roland Barthes' famous post-mortem 'The Death of the Author', in which Barthes argues that the author cannot - or can no longer - claim to be the unique source or meaning and/or value of the work of art.) For Paolini... the work of art is an essentially narcissistic structure which returns neither the artist's nor the viewer's gaze. In Mimesi - which remains for me Paolini's most powerful work - he deploys, with his customary elegance and economy, two identical plaster casts of an antique Venus pudica mirror images, exchanging gazes into infinity. An image of fulfilled desire - the narcissistic desire for our own image that motivates our looking at works of art - Mimesi radically excludes both artist and viewer in the name of its own internal completion." (C. Owens, Giulio Paolini, exh. cat., New York, 1987.)