The
fragments of Scrittura privata lie scattered over
the ground in the adjacent area. This constitutes a new beginning
in that, for the first time, the artist uses a place of ruins
to house other ruins whose definitive disappearance is left
to time in a process that is, however, by no means aleatory
– nothing is aleatory in Paolini’s work –
but planned. We know what will disappear, how it will disappear
and where it will disappear. The only unknown is time: the
enigma of the hour, to quote the work’s subtitle. Sixty
fragments, like the sixty minutes of the hour, are strewn
over an area of sixty square meters with a text “to
memory” written on them by the artist in indelible ink.
Already illegible due to its fragmented state, it will also
be at the mercy of time and the elements. Two points of reference
are suggested by Paolini: other fragments, like the ruins
of the library of Pergamum or Antonio Canova’s urn for
the ashes of the Contessa Lodovica Callemberg, or images of
time such as De Chirico’s L’enigma dell’ora,
of course, and, at the other extreme, the “exact”
time registered by the Naval Observatory in Washington as
regulated by Greenwich mean time. |
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