Michelangelo Pistoletto

AA.VV., L'arte moderna, Milan 1970, vol. 15, p. 220, illustrated 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are two small and minor losses to the tissue to the bottom corners and two very small tears along the bottom edges that have been re-glued. Close inspection reveals a small indentation to the top left corner.
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A definitive exponent of self-reference and a seminal model for post-Modernism, Michelangelo Pistoletto's Muro from 1967 is a rare example of his famous and highly significant Quadri Specchianti, or Mirror Paintings.  The most important series within the artist's oeuvre, these works explore art's ability to mirror the dynamism and mutability of life.  Including the depiction of a brick wall, bucket and mortar palette, fused to a mirrored stainless steel surface, Pistoletto simultaneously creates a world of real and reflected images that conflates pictorial and physical space. The environment in front of the mirror is continually depicted, capturing the unending space within the picture frame.  Herein, the polished steel becomes a threshold creating a dialogue of infinite diversity and changeability between the space of the gallery and the picture plane to achieve a concrete artistic expression of reality.  In Pistoletto's own words: "All elements in the picture are of such a degree of reality that the result cannot be a mere hypothesis.  The result is real.  One has to seek out the point where the three dimensions, and stability and movement, converge: it is to be found in the contour which marks the interface between the silhouettes and the mirror surface... The third dimension is revealed in this very line, through the sense of distance which we feel between ourselves, the silhouette and our own reflected image." (Michelangelo Pistoletto in: Exhibition Catalogue, Genoa, La Bertesca Gallery, The Minus Objects, 1966, n.p.). 

Dissatisfied with painterly convention in which traditional representation invoked a simulacrum of reality, Pistoletto discovered the potential of reflection as a means of creating a meaningful true image, projecting himself and the viewer through time and space into the same composition.  Having first experimented with surface reflection in 1956 with a series of self-portraits on varnished and shiny backgrounds, Pistoletto refined his method from 1961 instead using highly polished stainless steel onto which painted tissue paper were grafted.  A method most commonly used in Pistoletto's oeuvre to portray the relationship of a life-size human figure to the infinitely changeable mirrored surface, the introduction of an unfinished brick wall in the present work creates a heightened sense of spatial disparity and trompe l'oeil illusionism.  Finely painted onto tissue after a photographic source, the wall's static representation and fusion with the metallic surface compounds a representational dichotomy between the inert painted image and the constant evolution of mirrored reflections.  As a result, Pistoletto achieves one of the most powerful examinations of the relationship between artist and viewer in the history of Western art.

Pistoletto's constantly evolving Mirror Paintings ultimately provide entirely new parameters for representation, yielding an inquiry into the fourth dimension: time.  As summarised by Germano Celant: "Pistoletto offers a surface open to all present and future transit, a hypersensitive organism for receiving and transmitting" (Germano Celant in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Institute of Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum, Pistoletto, Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, 1988, p. 22). Providing a poetic chronology of his oeuvre, Pistoletto's series of Mirror Paintings look into the past and the future simultaneously, eliding 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 becomes 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, an image 'snapped' at a certain 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 cited 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 acts as a threshold between the world of real images and that of those reflected, with figures and objects alternately fluctuating between the physical and pictorial space. Thus the expanse of reality enters the closed and limited arena of 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.  Crossing the boundary between art and life, Pistoletto's employment of the mirror's reflective surface acts as a metaphor for the idea of nature, thereby sanctioning the removal of simulated reality.  The represented image comes from the mirror itself, and in so doing, arouses our awareness of the illusion of painting.