Artist Michelangelo Pistoletto is Looking For Paradise
Artist Michelangelo Pistoletto captures the world as he sees it.
A leading figure of Pop Art and Arte Povera, Michelangelo Pistoletto interrogates space and time, trying to capture reality in his works. Pistoletto began his artistic practice at the age of 14, restoring ancient artworks in his father’s workshop in Turin. When he was 20, Pistoletto enrolled in Armando Testa’s advertising school, also in Turin, and discovered modern and contemporary art. The artist, now 90, has paintings and sculptures exhibited in the world’s preeminent museums, including the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Guggenheim, the MoMa, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more.
Now, Galleria Continua is exhibiting several of Pistoletto’s works in San Gimignano, Rome, Paris, Havana, and Les Moulins. “These works are still together since they are exhibited simultaneously, albeit separated by great distances,” says the artist.
Pistoletto speaks with L’OFFICIEL about his practice, his place among Pop Art icons, and his upcoming exhibitions.
L’OFFICIEL: How did it all start? Do you remember when you first picked up a pencil or a brush?
MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO: I have no memory of a precise moment, but my daughter has recently found in a forgotten room some drawings and a notebook from when I was a child. In a drawing, I represented myself sculpting a huge statue (eight or 10 times bigger than I) with a small, singular instrument: a hoe.
L’O: You already saw yourself as an artist capable of great works.
MP: I don’t think so. The curious thing is, however, that, not remembering this drawing at all, at the beginning of the 1980s, I started sculpting huge pieces not with a hammer, not with other instruments, but with a hoe. It was really strange to find that drawing.
L’O: How are your pieces born?
MP: Following an intuition, then it’s about turning it into reality. There may be a more or less long reflection; there may be experimental steps. For example, I took about ten years to get to the Quadri Specchianti [mirror paintings on highly polished stainless steel, with reflective surfaces that integrate the viewer and surrounding environment into the artwork].
L’O: In what way?
MP: By gradually eliminating the background behind the figure, which in “traditional” painting can be an environment or a landscape, up to a monochrome background. First gold, then silver, copper, then again colored with industrial paints, which allowed me to transform the backdrop into a hyper-reflective surface. Gold—hieratic, think of how the Egyptians used it—gives a sense of immensity and was a clear reference to the Byzantine icons that I restored with my father.
L’O: What brought you from gold to stainless steel?
MP: Like gold, it was durable, but it was not so much this feature that interested me, as it was the fact that polished steel is colorless. So it has no image of its own. This total absence of image allowed everything already existing to enter the picture.
L’O: Quadri Specchianti was brought to international fame in the ‘60s when you were exhibited, as the only Italian, with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, and framed as a leading figure of Pop Art.
MP: Pop Art was an exact and meaningful connection to my work. I do not deny that experience at all; indeed I recognize its maximum weight. But there was a fundamental difference between me and the other Pop Art artists.
L’O: Which is?
MP: Let’s start with what united us. I started from a concept of universality and immortality of art, linked to life, from the beginning, arriving at the most total objectivity of the mirror picture. So there is no subjectivity, no transport in the work of my own emotions, my denunciation. It’s the existing self—representing myself in the mirror—that helps me understand myself. We no longer find the artist’s spontaneity—the personalistic work of Action Painting or Abstract Expressionism—but a universal and objective conception of existence.
L’O: But for Americans, the universal system was the one based on capitalism. Jasper Johns at the 1958 Venice Biennale presented a work depicting the American flag while Warhol painted Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell’s Soup can.
MP: Yes, universality coincided with the American consumerist system. There was nothing outside of that for them. The economic system, then considered the most advanced, was the objective. Leo Castelli [a gallerist who, together with his wife Ileana Sonnabend, first represented expressionists like Pollock, de Kooning, Twombly, and then the most important Pop Art artists like Warhol, Rosenquist, Flavin, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, and with them, Pistoletto] told me that I had to give up being a European artist. I said that on the contrary, I gave up being a representative of that system.
L’O: Was that an artistic response?
MP: Yes, for several months between 1964 and 1965 I worked on a group of works that I called Minus Objects. Each work was different from the other, in materials, proportions, in all senses. Each of these works could be the work of a different artist. In this way, it was impossible to identify myself as an artist and I took off the moniker of “mirror paintings artist.”
L’O: In Italy, you’re celebrating turning 90 not only with the exhibition at the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome, but also with the installation of a colossal “Venus of the Rags” in Naples. Why give Naples this gift out of all the other Italian cities?
MP: Naples is not recognized for its strong artistic dimension. It has an extraordinary history, and its museums and churches contain important works. Even in the subway, two stations have my work. With “Lo Zoo” [a group of multidisciplinary artists] in the 1960s, I made several performances in Naples. It is a very lively city and for me, it is like home. Naples is also a port open to the Mediterranean, to the shores littered not only by the deaths of migrants trying to cross it but also by the products of consumerism that the rags [used in “Venus of the Rags”] represent.
L’O: What does this work signify?
MP: The figure of Venus is found throughout history, from the Greeks and the Romans to us, representing the concept of timeless beauty. This work finds its meaning in the relationship with the rags amassed. And in the regenerative force that imprints on them, after being “embraced” by its beauty.
L’O: You are rightly considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century and the new millennium. Do you feel the weight of that?
MP: I don’t feel any weight; I don’t think I’m carrying anything. Through my artistic practice, I have come to create a formula that can help others.
L’O: What formula?
MP: It’s the formula of creation, an infinity that expands and encompasses all reality. Everyone now knows how to re-create. It is not only the artist who can create. We are all called to do it and, above all, we can’t wait for someone to do it in our place, in which case we would consent to a hierarchical system towards which I am strongly opposed. It’s the concept of demopraxia, a common practice of all, to build a peaceful and democratic society, the so-called Third Paradise.
