WEB page: Until 1960 Paolini trained as a set-designer and graphic designer, then he had a preoccupation with art and collages in order to analyze artistic means as well as to examine linguistic systems. The first documented work, Geometric Design, stems from 1960. Since 1965 Paolini has picked art and the history of art and their possibilities of conveying message as a central theme. In 1964 his first individual exhibition took place in the Galleria La Salita in Rome, since then he has been represented in numerous individual and group exhibitions in Italy and other countries. In 1967 he was a participant of the first exhibition of Arte Povera in the Galleria Bertesca in Genova and he took part, inter alia, in several Documenta-exhibitions in Kassel as well as in the Biennale di Venezia in 1970 and 1997. Paolini is concentrated on the phenomenon of seeing, touching themes such as space, time, perspective or the cultural conditioning of author and observer. In 1970 he started to study photography. Since 1972 he has been creating groups of works, titled Idem, which refer to each other. In the course of the seventies he looked into the classical-mythological symbolism through photography and classical sculptures in plaster, as they question the meaning of art, originality and reproduction. Since the beginning of the eighties his conceptual installments have become more bodily and multi-layered by weaving in architectonic elements, artificial sources of light and video. His philosophical and critical essays, which have been published in diverse magazines since 1975, also appeared as independent publications, e.g. Idem (1975) with an introduction by Italo Calvino, Contemplator Enim, L'arte e lo spazio (1983) and Lezioni di pittura. In 1996 he published La veriti  (Einaudi). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.