Giulio Paolini (b. 1940)

The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by the artist.

Inspired by Antoine Watteau's acceptance piece to the French Royal Academy in 1717, l'Embarquement pour Cythère (collection Musée du Louvre), the present work is from a series of eleven works entitled Cythère that Giulio Paolini executed between 1983 and 1994. Throughout the series, Paolini employs a photograph of the sea placed behind shattered glass each with a different intervention to the picture place or at times with no interventions but with three-dimensional plaster casts placed on the floor. Each photograph is taken from a similar vantage point but at different hours of the day. There is confusion regarding Watteau's l'Embarquement pour Cythère and whether the painting depicts an arrival at Cythera, birthplace of the Roman Goddess Venus, or a departure. Paolini similarly captures this sentiment leaving the viewer with a distinct sense of longing for this unreachable paradise island as described by Charles Baudelaire in Un voyage à Cythère:

Quelle est cette île triste et noire? - C'est Cythère,
Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons
Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.
Regardez, après tout, c'est une pauvre terre.

-- Île des doux secrets et des fêtes du coeur!
De l'antique Vénus le superbe fantôme
Au-dessus de tes mers plane comme un arôme
Et charge les esprits d'amour et de langueur.