Dal vero

Between 1960 and 1964, Giulio Paolini had pioneered in a series of blank canvases exposing nothing but their own physical and material presence in the space and time of the viewer, an entirely new selfreflexive art of investigation into the nature of art and representation.
It was an approach that greatly anticipated the direction of much Conceptual art and came to establish Paolini as one of the earliest pioneers of what Germano Celant would later term Arte Povera.


Dal vero ('From Life') executed in 1965 is one of the first of Paolini's subsequent series of works from this early period in which the artist further explored the nature of what a picture is through the medium of photography. Whereas Paolini's earlier works had dealt with the material nature and reality of a picture as an object in space - the canvas, its primer, the stretchers that support it and its position on the wall or in a room - Dal vero, as its title suggests, concerns itself also with the nature of the image and with the idea of representation. It comprises of a photograph laid down on a blank canvas. The image on the photograph (taken from the 'live' model) is that of the same primed white canvas leaning against the back of another canvas. The tautology of this self-reflective image, along with the humour of its title, opens up a range of ideas about the nature of representation and also the concept of time as a determining factor in the creation and reception of a work of art. As Paolini has explained, 'My whole oeuvre turns on an image, 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).