“(…) Seeing Bacon, I perceived that my problem and my drama were already there, declared, by a man searching for his own dimension and his own space, a cage of impenetrable glass, in which the man lived in such a dramatic state as to be suffocated, to be without a voice or space. The man was blocked, hunted, sick, destroyed, anguished, splendidly painted but, in his state, terribly isolated (...). I continued my search, condensing my work on the man, but attempting to do the opposite of Bacon: to remove all expression and all movement from the figures, so as to cool down the dramatic effect’. Until he arrived at the mirror, which for the artist represented the search for his identity. “Who am I? What am I? How can I identify my existence through Art? Since I come from a totally figurative artistic culture, I took up my person as the image to identify. That is why I used the method of the self-portrait, which requires the use of the mirror. The image of myself, depicted life-sized, remains fixed in the painting, while the surrounding background has become a mirror. The world has entered the mirror transformed into a work of art and therefore my self-portrait has become the self-portrait of the world”. Through himself, Michelangelo Pistoletto discovers what is different from himself. The identity of his own fixed image corresponds to the identity of any other person; the virtual space of the mirror surface opens a door that puts art in communication with life.
There is also a recent series of mirror paintings that depict Cuba and its people: “(...) starting from Cuba to develop a new idea of politics. This is my belief. From Cuba, at a time of global social pressure and crisis, we can start a new way of enacting our politics. Cuba must not capitulate to the sole model that guides the world, considering the current results. We can transform the world, starting from Cuba.
View of the exhibition, MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO, One and One makes Three,
Collateral Event of the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore and Officina dell’Arte Spirituale, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venezia, 2017. Courtesy: Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana. Photo by: Oak Taylor-Smith