Casa di Lucrezio
Date: 1981-84
Medium: entire plaster heads, plaster fragments, silk and wooden bases, Overall dimensions variable, Plaster heads: 47 cm high
Dimensions: 120 × 30 × 30 cm
The work is the last example of a cycle of nine same-titled installations, created between 1981 and 1984 by Giulio Paolini (Disch, nos. 452–458, 481, 517) and the subject of cryptic statements by the artist over the years. In its complexity, themes, and development, the series is representative of the artist's maturity, reached in the 1980s through elaborate installations, rich in literary references and installed with a sensitivity to the surrounding space, at times intended to constitute autonomous exhibitions. During this decade, Paolini imbued his output — characterised by a self-reflexive analysis of artistic language — with frequent allusions and dramaturgical content drawn from his work as a set and costume designer for the theatre, an experience that began in 1969 and intensified throughout the 1970s. The result is a body of composite, environmental works that give rise to rarefied and evocative scenes, often inhabited by reproductions of works from the past which, incomplete or reduced to fragments, point back to an absent and irremediably lost original. Like walk-on actors, they seem to announce to the viewer a performance yet to come, or one that has already taken place.
All the installations in the series share the presence of white bases, draped fabrics, fragments of a plaster tablet, and plaster replicas of a classical head — the latter cast by the Gipsoteca Mondazzi in Turin from a sculpture yet to be identified. Beginning with two heads, two fabrics, and two tablet fragments in the first work, the constituent elements increase gradually across successive variants, which also differ from one another in their technical and semantic configuration, as well as in the colour of the fabric used. The key to the work's meaning lies, alongside the title, in the inscription on the tablet: together with the text "Labyrinthus Hic Habitat Mynotaurus", it reproduces an image taken from the Enciclopedia Einaudi — namely the ancient graffito of the labyrinth of the Minotaur traced on one of the pillars of the peristyle of the so-called Casa di Lucrezio in Pompeii, today no longer visible (Enciclopedia Einaudi, p. 12). With a poetic licence typical of the artist's lyrical conceptualism, Paolini imagines that the grand villa belonged not to the Pompeian duovir Marcus Lucretius Fronto, but to the author of De Rerum Natura, Titus Lucretius Carus, whose ideal likeness is proposed by the plaster faces. Each work, which refers to the dwelling of the Latin poet, thus symbolises a labyrinth — a topos dear to Paolini's poetics as an allegory of poetry and art. The draped cloth may be read as the tunic of Lucretius or, in light of the myth evoked here, as an allusion to Ariadne's thread, which the viewer is invited to follow as they move through the work. The ensemble of variants produces a catalogue of possible ways of arranging the same elements, whose image is multiplied as if seen through the lenses of a kaleidoscope.
The ninth version of the work extends to eleven the conjectured likenesses of the Latin poet and varies the fabrics across a range of light spanning from dawn to dusk — colours employed elsewhere by the artist as symbols of maximal temporal breadth and cyclicality. It was created for the solo exhibition Giulio Paolini. La Casa di Lucrezio, held at Palazzo Rosari Spada as part of the XXVII Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto in 1984, an exhibition of which the work forms the conceptual centrepiece: the artist arranged its various components along the perspectival enfilade of the exhibition rooms, punctuated by eleven windows, in such a way as to relate all the other exhibited works to Casa di Lucrezio, according to a unified curatorial concept aimed not only at establishing mirror-play between individual works, but at offering the exhibition itself as a work of art in its own right. "The eleven 'figures' who from the eleven windows seem here to possess with their gaze (and thus to exclude from ours) the eleven works on display are clothed in the symbolic garb of time and space: each one (origin or reflection?) announces and defines its own place as the original moment of each of the works to which it finds itself, in turn, corresponding. The fragments of the labyrinth and the nuances of the tunics, then, bear witness to nothing other than the incontestable visibility of countless dawns that lead, every one, to an equal number of dusks" (G. Paolini in Giulio Paolini. La Casa di Lucrezio, 1984, p. 33).
Provenance
The artist's studio;
Galleria Mario Pieroni, Rome;
Private collection;
Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco;
Cardi Gallery, Milan/London
Exhibited
Giulio Paolini. Casa di Lucrezio, XXVII Festival dei Due Mondi, Palazzo Rosari Spada, Spoleto, 27 June – 16 July