Since the early 1960s Giulio Paolini has been conceptually investigating the methods and instruments of artistic practice (bare canvases and frames, colors, screens), exploring the relation of the work with space and time and, of course, with the viewer. Disegno geometrico (Geometric Drawing, 1960), his first known work, was already symptomatic of this approach, a canvas in which only geometric squares appear, anticipating every possible image. As he wrote in that year: “The work pre-exists the intervention of the artist (who is the first to be able to contemplate it). Research is directed at absolute images, inherent in the
very nature of the canvas and the use of an elementary technique.” It was Germano Celant who introduced Paolini to Ileana Sonnabend and Antonio Homem in 1971.