Giulio Paolini Exhibition

Today while my group of students were at Madame Tussauds (grim), I took the opportunity to go and see the Giulio Paolini exhibition, To Be Or Not To Be, at the Whitechapel Gallery. I had been meaning to go to the Whitechapel for a while anyway to see the new relief work on the building by Rachel Whiteread, a beautifully subtle addition to the facade.

On entering the Paolini exhibition I was confronted by a large black and white photo on a canvas, showing the artist standing behind a stretcher frame. This made a couple of recurring themes clear from the outset  - the idea of viewer as artist and artist as subject, and  ideas of shape and composition suggested by the strong grid composition. There are several more photographic canvasses throughout the exhibition, many of them using the effect of mise-en-scene or mise-en-abyme, again with the artist as the subject, which reminded me of Luigi Di Sarro photographs.
 

Blank canvas is a recurrent material in the show, self-consciously exploring the nature of making art and artistic potential – a blank canvas can become anything. Canvasses arranged in rigid grid formations dominated the ground floor, with sparingly drawn lines and occasional prints and other objects interspersed to make large but aesthetically fairly minimal installations. Paolini’s crisp clean lines, and simply but precisely rendered line drawings, either classical looking figures reminiscent of old marble statues (raising the question of creative influence), or figures representing the artist, are arranged to make the viewer consider questions of composition, potential and artistic intent.

Upstairs there was a large room split into three, each containing a large installation. The first was a mise-en-scene representation of an artists’ studio, with a cubic plexiglass desk, with clamped on lights and a chair. On the desk was a miniature easel faced by a small chair showing that in the making of the piece Paolini is examining his own practice. Surrounding the piece there were lots of scrunched up pieces of pieces of paper suggesting the myriad possibilities available to the artist and the lost potential of work which doesn’t come to fruition.

The second of the three sections had a large installation of plexiglass screens with cut out sections and transfers of footmen all facing in different dimensions making the piece very dimensional. Several different objects – pieces of paper, two chairs (with caned seats which brought another element of pattern and geometry into the work) and a polyhedron with a transfer and drawn lines, surrounded the main plexiglass screen.

copyright Giulio Paolini

To me this piece strongly evoked abstract concepts of space and time with its historical references and precise lines. I loved walking around it and seeing new perspectives and different shapes framed by the structure.

The straight lines and shapes are strongly reminiscent of perspective and compositional aids and geometrical rules, for example the idea of the Golden Section, continuing the idea of historical influence by evoking classical drawing and formal techniques, a concept which carried through to the next and final piece.

This was another plexiglass table, similar to the first but covered with lots of different drawings and prints – some of outer space, some of old anatomical and scientific line drawings which brought to mind the Renaissance and the beginning of proper scientific enquiry and its relation to art. The sheets were arranged as though scattered on the desk with a torn arial view of a man – presumably the artist – laid on top of the other sheets in a scene which suggests a frenzy of creativity. However, order is restored by another sheet of plexiglass which is laid on top of the papers, holding everything firmly in place and giving a sense of weight. Another cane-seated chair sits by the table but this one is on its side as if thrown down by the artist in a rage which gives the work a feeling of tension. The fact that it remains on its side also makes the piece oddly humorous as though the artist has chosen to preserve the scene of his frustration in an act of self-mockery. This was the perfect ending to an exhibition which explored ideas of process and composition in an interesting and highly enjoyable manner.