Les adventures de la dialetique (II)

Against the background of a tree-lined avenue, a white framing inscribes a double
plant graft. From the centrally located tree along the road it rises
another tree, which is superimposed on the image of a growing cypress
inside an oak tree. Fragments are scattered in the foreground
photos of another landscape, as if it were a torn image that reveals
look at the view below. Even the title implies the joint of
two different references: on the one hand the citation of the volume of the same name by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Les aventures de la dialectique, 1955) and on the other
the evocation of a well-known painting by René Magritte (Éloge de la dialectique, 1937).
As indicated by the numbering in the title, the edition constitutes the second
variant of a theme started in 1975, in a collage that the artist recalls in
these terms. “The work on paper was born from a photograph taken by me
wife, Anna Piva, in Tuscany. As we strolled I was amazed by a
cypress born and raised inside an oak tree. Combining that shot with some
fragments depicting other landscapes, I created an interpenetration of
images, a montage of sky on sky and water on earth, to echo the
tree interpenetration. The 'adventures' of dialectics are the suppositories
contradictions to which dialectics can lead us”1. In the graphic edition,
Paolini superimposes this original image on a new tree graft
photographed on the street: a sort of mise en abîme, where the eccentricity of
natural world is the protagonist.