1940     born in Genoa, lives in Turin

His work is at first contextualized in the field of Poor Art, but it positions  itself immediately in a conceptual dimension that will remain constant in all of his productions, like you can tell already from the first art piece made in 1960: Geometric design is a canvas on which the artist traced the geometric squaring of the surface, preliminary procedure  at every possible representation. Starting from this first reflection on the space of the representation and the actual statute of the art work, Paolini developed a complex research centred on specific art themes and progressively inherent to always more vast fields, that subtract uniqueness to the art work to give it the capability to hint to infinite possible existences.

His works, oriented towards a declared theatricality, put in action the waiting for an unknown image, that in search of a model at the same time new and old, constantly runs away from its own definition. Between the main characteristics of his operative manner quotation, duplication and fragmentation figure as expedients to stage the distance, in respect to a completed model, and to make the art work into a “theatre of evocation”. To these proceedings, that attain to a vast repertory of mythologies and cultural memories, recovered through photography, collage and plaster cast, the following work as a pendant: articulate and composite preparations, soaked on additive dynamics (seriality, repetition, juxtaposition), centrifuges (explosion and dispersion starting from the centre) or centripetal patterns (concentration, overlapping, joint).

The frequent use of quoting is always made of textual insertions: works reproduced with photographs, paintings of other artists, plaster casts, ancient prints, literary passages. In Young Looking at Lorenzo Lotto(1967), the title integrates the art work based on the production in real size of the painting of Lotto “Portrait of a young” and transforms for a split second each spectator into Lorenzo Lotto, confirming the fact that the art work exists only in the eyes of who is looking at it. Paolini’s endless investigation around the definition and the reason of the art work also focuses with particular insistence on the expositive act, intended as a fundamental moment of the encounter with the art work; therefore, both the relationship between the art work and the expositive space, and the behavior that the spectator assumes inside it, come at issue.

From 1964, the year of his first personal exposition, at the Gallery La Salita di Roma, Paolini exposed in galleries and museums all over the world. The great anthological expositions in the museums start towards the end of the Seventies, but already since the beginning of the decennium he participates several times to the  Documenta of Kassel and to the Biennale of Venice.