NOIRE

The nine screen prints make up a large ‘picture,’ inhabited by four footmen in eighteenth-century costumes arranged along the diagonals. The footmen – who in Paolini language represent ‘stagehands’, discreet witnesses of the act of representation – present details of astronomical maps that respectively illustrate the stars ‘Pictor’ and ‘Sculptor’ (the latter belongs to the constellation of ‘Phoenix’, mentioned in the title of the edition). The perspective vanishing point, hinted at in pencil along the diagonals, meets in the center a rectangle of the same dimensions as the star charts, which in turn contains a small cut-out square, a kind of vanishing point towards an unlimited space, or conversely, a ‘blind window’.

Bettina Della Casa