Giulio Paolini: Pietre Preziose (Precious Stones)
- Romina Rosso
- Jun 14
- 5 min read
Pietre Preziose, is a permanent installation created by the artist Giulio Paolini in 2017, reusing original architectural elements of the Chapel of the Holy Shroud, baroque masterpiece of the architect Guarino Guarini, recovered from the fire that damaged it in the night of the 11th and 12th of April 1997.
The work was masterfully placed within the Royal Gardens Grove, designed by Paolo Pejrone, inserting elms, lindens and plane trees that rise on an area crossed by long orthogonal paths and divided into large beds of regular shape, from where you can see the Dome of the Holy Shroud in the distance.
The Royal Gardens are spread over an area of about seven hectares, a unique urban green area of monumental and environmental value, in the centre of Turin.
Paolini’s work consists of a light granite platform with a dark basalt design embedded, which reproduces the enlargement of a free-hand sketch by Paolini representing the structure of the dome of the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. In the centre, seated theatrically on a white cube, a resin sculpture depicts a male character in period costume, drawing with a pencil in a hand.
All around this figure are placed parts of columns and original capitals burned from the Chapel of the Holy Shroud.
The protagonist, setting in the middle of the ruins, is a symbolic double of the author: neither explicit effigy of Guarini, nor self-portrait declared, he is an ambiguous figure, old and contemporary at the same time, that confronts himself with the ruins of a lost original, ennobled by the title "Precious Stones".
Paolini declared: "Someone (the author) is here, centuries later, to find an architecture in ruins, fragments fallen and moved away from their original location. We (spectators) thus witness the '"still life'"constituted by the marble remains of the dome badly damaged in the fire of 1997".
The same artist points out that the title, “Pietre Preziose (Precious Stones)”, is a "driven title because it is a paradox: in reality these stones are not precious, valuable is the intention that had produced and placed them and even, if I may say so, the configuration that is now returning them. They are not just remains but are parts of that original architecture: the recovery and the arrangement "to art" wants to celebrate its immortality".
The work was commissioned to the artist by the Consulta per la Valorizzazione dei Beni Artistici e Culturali of Turin, which has been able to recognise in a pile of ruins damaged by the fire a potentially living matter, charged with symbolic values, with the strong emotional impact and has been able to entrust this project to a great contemporary artist who has returned us a simple and powerful masterpiece.
An art project that, due to the size of the moved and cleaned pieces, has been able to benefit from a technical contribution of high quality, that of the firm Catella, historical supplier of marbles of the Royal House and last, direct descendant of the ancient Comacine masters, who for centuries were called to embellish the major European courts.
Giulio Paolini is one of the most interesting exponents of the Italian conceptual art.
Born in Genoa but artistically raised in the geometric city of Turin, a city that had also inspired Friedrich Nietzsche and Giorgio De Chirico, two key figures for Paolini, especially about the concept of time.
From Nietzsche he will take the idea of the eternal return and from De Chirico that time is circular.
Paolini’s creativity is an eternal return, following the idea of Nietzsche, of this continuous chasing.
Paolini’s work from its beginnings is a remake, but a repetition that always happens in a different way, in an almost theatrical circularity.
His works are like ensembles, shots in a suspended time: if there is no end, there is not even a beginning, there is no past or future, but a continuous present that places us in a vortex.
The presence of the artist in his works is an eternal presence that makes him always contemporary.
The visitor is inserted and immersed in the figure of the artist.
Paolini exhibits works that introduce existential elements, proposes meditations about the time and the impossibility of grasping it, questioning the role of art and the figure of the artist, and at the same time he likes to destabilise the certainties of those who observe his works.
Pietre Preziose is in part inspired by the work Tre per tre (ognuno è l’altro o nessuno) 1998-99, where the figure in eighteenth century clothes triplicates in three male figures apparently equal but representing three different moments and roles of the same character.
Paolini himself describes it as follows: "The first, the absent gaze, lost in the void, is the model, posing for a portrait. The second, similar to the first, is the author of the portrait and he is engaged in sketching. The third, still a replica of the other two, is the viewer of the work: it could therefore be the viewer of the portrait that still unfinished, or of the work, of this very one that we are trying to describe and to which it belongs."
The three characters gravitate in the same place: the site of the work, or the space where the work takes place.
The oxymoron is created thinking that the host of the work is the author, who hosts in turn the observer.
The gesture of watching and drawing or drawing and watching is repeating in a loop to infinity.
Paolini asks himself: "How many and what are the images called to contribute to the solution of the enigma? And, even before that, of which enigma we are talking about? What puzzle can be solved by images if an image is itself a puzzle?".
The artist for Paolini is not out of the world but neither in the world.
We are spectators, the sphere of art does not communicate directly, it wants to catch an echo, a forgotten ancient trace able to emerge from the most remote deposits of our memory.
Art is contextualised in something that has no time or place, a universe of its own, and the city of Turin is made to welcome thought, a suspended time as an invitation to wait for something that is enigmatically intangible.
Looking at the work Pietre Preziose our gaze goes from the artist-observer to the ruins of the past until the perfection of the Guarini Dome almost in a metaphysical silence, which seems to highlight the limit of the perceptive act, that distinguishes in this case the representation in the figure of the man from the reality given by the dome of Guarini visible in the background.
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