Air 1983

Giulio Paolini made Air, a sculpture that floats an inverted plaster cast of a winged figure. It’s all about how we see. The surface of the sculpture itself is matte and pale, as if the plaster has aged, adding to the classical feel. The light catches the edges of the wings, and the folds of drapery, but it’s the shadow on the wall that does the most work. The body is foreshortened and distorted when projected as a shadow onto the wall, transforming a figure of flight into something else entirely. Paolini is playing with the nature of representation, gesturing towards Plato’s cave and the idea of shadows as simulacra. Is the shadow a distortion of the original, or does it have an independent existence? Thinking about these questions takes me back to Man Ray’s Rayographs. Like Man Ray, Paolini seems to want to embrace ambiguity, seeing art as an ongoing experiment rather than a definitive statement.