Lo spazio (The space)

Deeply elegant and conceptually provocative, Giulio Paolini’s Lo spazio (The space) takes its name from the pioneering exhibition at Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa, in 1967, which launched the term Arte Povera. Designing the work as a ‘space’ in title and form, Paolini explores the infinite potential of a work of art through the literal and perceived space in which it is experienced. The work is composed of eight wooden letters, painted white, which spell out the titular phrase ‘L-O S-P-A-Z-I-O’ to be positioned across four white walls ‘at the height of the optical axis (160cm. from the ground) and at a mutual distance equal to 1/8 of the perimeter of the room’ (G. Paolini, 1967, quoted in M. Disch, Giulio Paolini: Catalogo ragionato Tomo primo 1960-1982, Milan 2008, p. 144). The square layout of the work’s required architectural setting lends itself to the socio-political and communal centres across Italy where Paolini envisaged variants of the work, such as Rome’s Piazza Navona and Piazza Carignano in Turin. Calling upon public spaces of congregation, this work heralds Arte Povera’s radical way of engaging with art on the immediate, intimate level of daily life.

Previously in the collection of Gian Enzo Sperone, the renowned gallerist who first introduced Paolini to the American public and New York Pop Art to Europe, Lo spazio’s fusion of material simplicity and conceptual complexity exemplifies Paolini’s signature contribution to Arte Povera. Meticulously tailored to the viewer’s eye-line, the work’s geometry becomes a framework for physical experience, bridging the divide between art, work and life. It invites the viewer to be complicit in its creation, collapsing distinctions between artist and spectator, studio and exhibition space. With its matte-white letters against classic white gallery walls, the work might at first seem barely more than empty space itself. As each viewer reads the letters in sequence, however, Lo spazio is brought to mesmerising life as the concept, definition, and perception of space all at once. This synthesis transforms the work of art into something both pre-existing and evergreen: as a highly precise outline of a spatial form it is also playfully born anew at every interaction, ‘making us guests in that sublime theatre which goes into action at the moment when the artist looks, even before touching it’ (M. Disch, ibid., pp. 34-35).

Quoting Milan Kundera, Paolini highlights how the history of art is born of the fact that it ‘consists not only of what that art has created but also of what it might have created … of all the possible and never created works’ (G. Paolini, ibid., p. 17). Ingeniously activating language and space as objects in as well as creative agents for spatial experience, Lo spazio carries a self-conscious history of its own past, present and future, alluding to the innumerable potential artworks it has been, could have been, and might still become.