Giulio Paolini's 'Teoria delle apparenze' at Galleria Fumagalli

Galleria Fumagalli in Milan presents 'Teoria delle apparenze', a solo exhibition of Italian artist Giulio Paolini, curated by Angela Madesani and Annamaria Maggi. The show features ten works from 1969 to 2015, selected with the artist's supervision, tracing a 57-year creative journey through reflections, repetitions, and evocations. The title references Paolini's 1972 work of the same name and highlights his key theme: the connection between appearance and truth at the origin of experience. Paolini, born in Genoa in 1940 and living in Turin, defines the artist as 'someone who wanders in the void, unable to renounce describing it.' He aligns with Heidegger's notion that 'forming occurs in the mode of circumscribing, as an including and an excluding with respect to the limit.' For Paolini, art does not express personal ideas but is complementary to the artist, with individual expression nullified and the work bearing witness to itself. Notable pieces include 'Da Quam raptim ad sublimia' (1969), a banner inspired by a room in the Vatican Museums that subverts political language, and 'Studio per "Da lontano"' (2015), a preparatory collage for an intervention at Museo Cappella Sansevero in Naples. Paolini participated in the collective intervention 'Campo Urbano' in Como in 1969. The Centre for Italian Modern Art in New York dedicated a research focus to him in 2016-17.