L'Altra Figura

Over the course of his career, Giulio Paolini has endeavoured to give form to the very nature of art, and L’Altra Figura (1983) is a witty and elegant communication of the fundamental paradoxes he has come to observe. The work consists of two classical busts which are plaster casts of an earlier Hellenistic bust. Between the two faces are thirty-three plaster fragments of a third identical bust. The two intact faces seem to have caught one another’s eye, perhaps a response to the devastation that divides them. Vision as a thematic is important to Paolini’s practice, which he regularly interrogates through the veil of art historical imagery. As in his famous photocopied portrait A Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto (1969), in which Paolini challenged assumptions of the relationship between the artist and his subject, L’Altra Figura too questions the act of seeing in art: is it the busts, the artist, or the viewer whose gaze reigns supreme? Time and space seem to collapse between the twinned busts as their stares double back and mirror one another, revealing the ways in which seeing and being seen are always intertwined. Parsing the aesthetics of looking has long underpinned Paolini’s work and with L’Altra Figura, he makes clear a mirrored image does not necessarily provide an identical view. ‘When I put two identical examples of the same ancient sculpture one in front of the other,’ he has explained, ‘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' (G. Paolini, quoted in C. Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, London 1999, p. 135).