Maurizio Cattelan

Consciously refusing to be identified with a single signature style, Maurizio Cattelan has produced an extremely varied body of work, playing with different styles and delivering his ideas in always new and unexpected ways.

Within this multifaceted output, a number of themes and motifs can be identified, none more prominent than the idea of creative theft. From Another Fucking Readymade (1996), when the artist stole the entire contents of another gallery for his own show at the De Appel gallery in Amsterdam, to his exhibition with Emmanuelle Perrotin’s in Paris Moi-même, soi-même (1997) when he presented an exact replica of Carsten Holler’s exhibition at the next door gallery, Cattelan has demonstrated his indifference to dogmas of ownership and property and his willingness to subvert them.

“Maurizio Cattelan is an inveterate sinner. He has no scruples about coveting his neighbour’s house or stealing his possessions.” (Francesco Bonami, Nancy Spector & Barbara Vanderlinden, Maurizio Cattelan, London 2003, p. 160) In this light, Untitled (Zorro) can be seen as a sort of programmatic manifesto. Belonging to one of his earliest series, it acts as the artist’s presentation of himself as Zorro, the popular comic character that fought the Spanish occupation of California in the early years of the 20^th century using all the means at his disposal, including theft, to bring justice to his pueblo. In this case the victim of Cattelan’s theft is his master and compatriot Lucio Fontana. And the booty is made up by the slashes on the canvas, which the young artist appropriates in order to create a completely different signature: that of a movie hero.

By merging the signature style of a recognised and respected master of contemporary art, with a symbol taken from the popular culture and mass media tradition, Cattelan is presenting us with the primary trait of his character, the one that bore him the nickname of “contemporary art prankster”: his absolute negligence for what is conventionally taken as sacred and untouchable. Cattelan follows a tradition that had started with Duchamp and his notorious LHOOQ (a reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to which the artist added a moustache) a tradition that has unconsciously always been part of his life – as a child he was fired from his job at a church when caught drawing moustaches on sacred effigies.

Here, by mocking his predecessor Fontana along with the aura of sacredness that the art world has conferred to him, he is subverting the accepted rules of the field in which he plays. In an “inexorable move towards a rebellion against prevailing intellectual and cultural codes” (ibid. p. 45), like Zorro’s deeds then, this theft too can be seen as a subterfuge to bear justice: a new kind of artistic activism against accepted dogmas, which, in his view, don’t befit the condition of the contemporary artist.