Eco

Mimesis and tautology are central themes in Giulio Paolini’s continuing exploration of the relationship between the ways in which an image is perceived, created and understood. In this fascinating work from 1976, Paolini presents a pictorial treatise upon the strange echoing relationship between images of works of art, their viewers and the spatial environments in which they are presented to the world. This treatise is itself presented in the form of a work of art that comprises solely of different, spatially-constructed images of some of the Mimesis and tautology are central themes in Guilio Paolini’s continuing exploration of the relationship between the ways in which an image is perceived, created and understood. In this fascinating work from 1976, Paolini presents a pictorial treatise upon the strange echoing relationship between images of works of art, their viewers and the spatial environments in which they are presented to the world. This treatise is itself presented in the form of a work of art that comprises solely of different, spatially-constructed images of some of the world’s most famous galleries and museum spaces and of the spectators within them.

Entitled Eco, (Echo), the work consists of nine framed images, each comprised of photographs of viewers at various art exhibitions. Within each of the nine, framed images are four smaller reproductions of spectators and exhibition spaces that echo the larger pictures. Some of these ‘echoes’ are photographs of other rooms in the gallery, others are details or fragments of the main image. To conform with the artist’s instructions and intention, Eco is installed horizontally and at eyelevel, with short, equidistant spaces set between each element, so that the whole mimics or echoes the alignment of all the internal images. In this way the viewer, in the act of viewing these works, also participates in creating another echo of the scenes depicted within the work itself.

Eco was made in an edition of three works and one artist’s proof in 1976, at a time when the artist was fascinated with questions of duplication, multiplication and reflection. The museums and galleries depicted begin with an image of the main entrance of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and end with one of the Print room in the same museum. The seven different galleries depicted in between these two representations of the Stedellijk Museum are the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven; the Museo Correr, Venice; the Palazzo Rosso, Genoa; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska; the Art Gallery, Lund in Sweden and the Fondation Maeght, in St Paul-de-Vence.

‘My whole œuvre turns on an image’, Paolini has said, ‘the image of our system of focusing (diaphragm) between the picture space and the object space; as in an ideal mirror, which reflects phenomena, but also lets us see that which constitutes it. The essence of this art tends towards a sort of paradoxical objectivity, because in the now, in the moment of perception, it introduces a temporary incompatibility; it compels a circular rather than a rectilinear reading and thus robs the manifest image of its evidence. All this up to the ‘moment of truth’, which always lies on the other side of each project. What remains is the pure presence (sublime or meaningless) of a work whose fate it is to widen the endless visionary series of discoveries that inspire the unfathomable path of art. The circular reading - there we have it - the most subtle strategy of modern art, which defines itself as art and also proceeds from the art itself.’ (Giulio Paolini, quoted in Giulio Paolini exh. cat. Museum of Modern art, Oxford, 1980, p. 4.)