Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto

(Biella, 1933)

In 1961 Michelangelo Pistoletto painted the first mirror painting, in which his life-size self-portrait stands out against a black background, obtained with highly polished acrylic color. The real protagonist of the work is the instantaneous relationship that is created with the viewer and in particular his or her reflection, in the surface of the canvas. Pistoletto then improves the technique of his mirror paintings by replacing the canvas with a sheet of mirror-polished stainless steel onto which he applies images of people and objects, taken from life-size photographs. At first he paints these images on tissue paper, then replaces them, beginning in the 1970s, with prints made with the silkscreen printing technique. From this period are the works Lightbulb, 1962-1966, and Sacred Conversation, 1972, in which reality and representation merge, in the exchange created by the reflection of what appears from time to time on the surface of the mirror.

Pistoletto’s work Venus of the Rags, 1967, is a true emblem of Arte Povera, a term used to identify a group of artists united by a radical rejection of traditional means of expression in order to make room for unconventional materials, “poor” precisely, including the scraps of everyday life. Here the reproduction of the statue Venus with an apple by neoclassical artist Thorvaldsen, with her back turned, sinks her face into a colorful pile of discarded clothes, in a dialogue between past and present. The rags represent all that passes, the transformation of matter, the transitory and in particular the product of consumerist and discarded society. Instead, the copy of the classical Venus in concrete is covered with mica, a mineral that gives it a particular luminescence, and refers to timeless order and beauty. With this work Pistoletto suggests a different way of looking at the art of the past and, by traversing the history, he wants to recontextualize this figure of ideal beauty, confronting her with the present time and all its contradictions.

In Black People, 1984, the monumental character of the sculpture contrasts with the weight of the material used, polyurethane foam (very light, despite its appearance), according to a dialectic of contraries that has always fascinated the artist. The figures are barely sketched, as if they were being born at the moment we see them. They refer to the art of the past, particularly to the tradition of classical statuary, and make us feel part of history, just as the mirror makes us aware of the present in which we are protagonists. Architecture of the mirror, 1990, consists of a large mirror surface with a frame made of gilded wood, divided into four parts. No more images appear here, only the mirror, because all the images of the world are ideally contained in it: the work in fact changes according to the space it is displayed in and the events it reflects.