COMMISSION #18 – GIULIANA PAOLINO

Una sola notte avvolge i tuoi cento occhi (A Single Night Envelops Your Hundred Eyes) is a wearable artwork composed of a series of mobile modular elements. Made of latex, casts of Giuliana Paolino’s hands reproduce the form of the peacock’s ocellated feathers, the sacred animal of Juno.

In the first book of the Metamorphoses, Ovid recounts how the peacock became dear to Juno after the death of Argus Panoptes. The goddess gathered the guardian’s hundred eyes and placed them upon the bird’s tail, transforming loss into image and memory. In this episode, Juno assumes the role of an agent of metamorphosis. While this gesture may initially appear to reflect her well-known impulse toward vigilance and control—as if those eyes might allow her to continue watching over Jupiter’s actions and transgressions—it also reveals a more intimate and compassionate dimension of the queen of Olympus. By preserving and resignifying Argus’ gaze, Juno grants it a second life.

In Una sola notte avvolge i tuoi cento occhi (A Single Night Envelops Your Hundred Eyes), Paolino symbolically assimilates her own hands to the eyes of Argus. Touch thus replaces sight, and knowledge—traditionally associated with visual experience—begins to emerge through tactile encounter.

The work investigates consciousness and perception, drawing in part on the so-called “worm problem,” formulated by Rodolfo Llinás in I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. According to this hypothesis, conscious experience may originate from the distinction between two forms of perception: on one side, the awareness of what happens to the body as a consequence of one’s own actions; on the other, the awareness of what occurs independently of them, in the external world.

Perhaps it is precisely within this epistemological tension that conscious action takes shape, moved by wonder—the thaumazein evoked by both Aristotle and Plato—a form of astonishment that unsettles, disorients, and emerges through encounter, or more precisely, through touching the other.

Finally, Paolino explores the importance of the tactile dimension in the perception of the artwork, too often subordinated to visual experience, which is still considered today one of the most privileged forms of access to knowledge.

Giuliana Paolino, Una sola notte avvolge i tuoi cento occhi (A Single Night Envelops Your Hundred Eyes), latex and fabric, 100 x 150 cm, 2026.