Lot 24 : f - MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO
Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2004
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Title:
IL METRO IL CUBO
Date:
B. 1933
Description:
signed, titled, dated 1968 and inscribed Ciao! on the reverse
painted tissue paper collage on polished stainless steel
Dimensions:
230 by 120cm.
90 1/2 by 47 1/4 in.
Provenance:
Kornblee Galleries, New York
Notes:
The present work belongs to Pistoletto's Quadri Specchianti or Mirror Paintings, the most important series of works in the artist's oeuvre in which he explores art's ability to mirror the dynamism and mutability of life. Dissatisfied with the traditional manner in which painting was merely reproducing reality, he discovered the potential of reflection as a means of creating a meaningful image, projecting himself and the viewer through time into the same composition. Starting in 1961 Pistoletto applied cut-out paper tissue onto polished stainless steel before moving onto images silk-screened onto mirrors, which allowed for greater definition and reflection. In doing so he achieves one of the most powerful examinations of the relationship between artist and viewer in the history of Western art.
His photosilkscreened images of people, life-size, on reflective surfaces were intended both to integrate the environment and the viewer into his work, and to question the nature of reality and representation. Providing a poetic chronology of his oeuvre, Pistoletto's series of mirror works looks into the past and the future simultaneously, eluding traditional classification as they continue to reflect an ever changing world around them. The viewer's space is interwoven with the artist's work and vision becoming an integral and dynamic part of the composition. As Pistoletto recalls, "In traditional painting, representation and drawing covers the entire surface. This is a static aspect that has come down through the years as a univocal signal. It can correspond to the figure that I place on the surfaces of the mirror painting, a fixed signal, and image 'snapped' at a certain historical moment. But in my mirror paintings the image co-exists with every present moment...In my works the current time of the future is already included in the continuous mobility of the images, in the constantly renewed present of the reflection." (Michelangelo Pistoletto quoted in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Pistoletto, Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, 1988, p. 31)
Peripheral vision, a sight we use primarily for defence, for survival, for a sense of the enveloping world, is one of the senses activated when confronted with the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto. The mirror surface acts as a threshold between the world of real images and that of the reflected images, with figures fluctuating alternatively between the physical to the pictorial space. Thus the expanse of reality enters the closed and limited space of the painting, reflecting the futurist Carlo Carra's prediction of 1910 that "we will put the viewer inside the painting." The placement of overlapping objects is arranged in such a way that we both see and are actually in Pistoletto's vision; one characterised by its perfect balance of attracting, engaging, involving, holding and releasing the viewer both metaphorically and in practice. The mirror's reflective surface acts as a metaphor for the idea of nature and allowed Pistoletto to remove representation from his work. The image comes from the mirror itself and in doing so, arouses our awareness the illusion of painting.
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