Pistoletto's work is an apotheosis of the ordinary. Its detached and dispassionate resolution might seem to be an exercise in technical facility, unrelated to human issues or aesthetic considerations. Yet, through the peculiar chemistry of his pictures, which transcends technical facility, this young Italian artist has generated a disturbing and inescapably demanding imagery.
A Pistoletto picture must be completed by the presence of the spectator. The artist is wholly concerned with illusionism, an illusionism in which one or more life-size figures or objects are portrayed on a mirror-like surface. The images he chooses are casual and semi-anonymous: a painting by him might consist of a back view of a man tying a shoelace; some of his works are representations of potted plants and of tables on whose surfaces rest such objects as glass vases and spectacles; one panel represents a dog wandering into a room; in a series of complex compositions, he shows processions of demonstrators waving flags and signs, but even in these ostensibly active events frozen time and arrested motion pervade.
Illusionism in painting has for so long been identified with antiquated tendencies and been considered contrary to the progressive spirit in art that, from the ascendant position of abstraction, it is despised and denigrated. Even the "hand-painted" realism of Surrealism represented a retreat from modernism despite its fantastic imagery which counterposed so many levels of reality. But during the past few years we have been witnessing some sharp attacks on this position. Pop art, in its cold literalism, rebels against an entirely aesthetic expression and has forced a reconsideration of the concept of illusionism.
Pistoletto's literalism, although timely because of its tenuous relationship to Pop art, developed in a much quieter, less programmatic, fashion. He came to his present style from a relatively traditional technique of figurative painting. During 1957 and 1958, he made a succession of life-size portrayals of "people belabored by the existential necessity to express their inner lives, threatened by an alienation that resulted from their inability to grasp a real sense of values in life." (Here there are, of course, definite affinities with the approach of the Italian film-makers Antonioni and Fellini.) In subsequent paintings, still done in conventional media, figures were presented as benumbed -- "neither sad nor joyous nor restless, but the anguish was still there -- in me, that is ..." Pistoletto says.
His use of reflection, as an integral aspect of his production, grew directly out of a series of large figurative compositions on backgrounds of gold, silver and bronze paint, an on a highly reflective black oilcloth. While working on a large canvas, he began, as was his usual procedure, to sketch the head of a standing man. "I was dumbfounded to see him come toward me, detaching himself from his painted background," he affirms. Through this somewhat visionary insight, Pistoletto saw himself as part of the painting, and the ambiguity in which his own body, the painted head and the reflection of the room merged fascinated him.
By the time he began the paintings on stainless steel sheets in 1963, Pistoletto's objects and figures had become remote, and he admits that he now felt less involved in expressing strong emotion. He affirms that the tensions originally inherent in his subjects were now transferred, or returned, to the unstable background -- that is, the real world of the spectator reflected in his mirrored picture surfaces. As steel surfaces rather than true mirrors, these provide an element of mild distortion in which the reflection of the observer and the perspective of the room become even more variable formal and psychological elements.
The first of these reflected surface paintings were essentially monochromatic in low-key grays. Recently, Pistoletto has begun to use color, not only to intensify the credibility of his forms but to heighten their sense of mass and presence. Although he forces himself to remain close to reality, he is also concerned with the abstract qualities of volume and light. His point of departure is a casual still photograph enlarged to life-size and translated to tissue paper silhouettes. Sometimes paint is applied to the reverse side of the tissue which is then adhered to the highly polished steel surface and the tissue silhouette is frequently worked over with soft pencil in order to define volumes.
Pistoletto uses photographic techniques with considerable directness, as do such artists as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Nikos, Martial Raysse and Rosalyn Drexler. But some of these artist use photography as part of a larger totality which includes freely brushed areas and actual objects; Rauschenberg, for example, employs photographic images as disparate fragments of experience. Pistoletto's approach is less complex and the collaged photographic image, reproduced in the scale of the observer, becomes the "constant," a catalyzing force which makes the spectator enter into new spatial and psychological relationships.
The artist is absorbed with such existential issues as that symbol of the present -- the anonymous, benumbed man. One of Pistoletto's most cohesive groups of works shows marchers and political demonstrators. Yet, these pictures remain apolitical and are generalized to include, within their ambience, the most active and passive polarities. In these paintings, he maintains, "as in real life we are surrounded by both violent and peace loving people." These polarities, so diverse and contradictory, are abstracted to the same level of impersonality. Pistoletto completely avoids the topical issue with the cryptic statement that "he who makes a protest painting arrests his vision at the fact that he portrays." In other words, Pistoletto refuses to engage himself; he does not take sides.
His marching figures, for all the apparent fervor of their cause, seem to look into themselves and not out at the world. They remain archetypes of remoteness. Isolated from their original environment and self-contained, they become participants in any new situation in which they find themselves. These individuals, all with a great quality of dignity, are independent of each other, and they seem to exist in a vacuum. Because portraiture is not the determining ingredient in a Pistoletto composition, his figures are personages within his "reach and environment ... they are, for that matter, within everybody's reach." They appear in life-size scale in order to merge with the observer's reflected image, thereby making him a structural as well as psychological element of the constantly shifting composition. Indeed their representation verges on neo-classical objectivity. The figures, deceptive in their human scale and near literal coloration, are basically abstractions, beautifully defined in sensitive tonalities. Pistoletto is acutely concerned with such traditional formal problems as placement and contour and a certain idealization in his work transforms prosaic subject matter to a universal level of "anywhere-anytime."
In many respect, Pistoletto's artistic ambience is an American one, although he has never lived here. Certain affinities, some admittedly tenuous, exist between his pictures and Pop art, environmental experiments and "happenings." His relationship to current Italian painting and sculpture is negligible, but a strong relationship exists between his imagery and that of recent Italian film-makers.
Pistoletto's only direct analogies to Pop art are the wry references in some of his works to his own experience attending the American exhibition at the 1964 Venice Biennale. His representation of Oldenburg's stove a Chamberlain sculpture at the Biennale are actually comments on recent American art. Although he is far removed from its ambience, it is traditional Surrealism, not recent Pop art, which is the permeating ingredient in these mirrors. By being presented an incomplete reality, the observer-participant is confronted with infinite possibilities for completing this reality. By allowing the observer to complete his paintings Pistoletto also invites him to consider the irrational. Ambiguity and semi-mythological situations are central to the Surrealism of an artist such as de Chirico with whose work Pistoletto has affinities. Pistoletto's becalmed space also evokes that of Magritte and Delvaux, masters of creating atmospheres in which time is suspended and spaces are ominously charged with a great sense of apprehension. In their works, details are rendered with painstaking logic in a transfigured atmosphere and a specific place or epoch is touched with mystery. A similar quality radiates form Pistoletto's work.
The relationship between this art and environmental concepts is implicit if less direct. In Pistoletto's work the spectator becomes a variable ingredient along with his immediate surroundings, in an environmental concept of art. Since Pistoletto considers his pictures to be distillations of the visible universe, he does not feel tied to a local or specific environment and his figures and objects could exist anywhere. "I can live in an airport as well as an apartment," he says, and "a regional mode of existence simply does not make any sense for me anymore." Ambivalence concerning location is part of his attitude, which is further reflected in the anonymity of his subject matter.
The environmental idea has of course been explored physically and intellectually in recent American painting and sculpture. For example, the "continuous" and enveloping large-scale sculptures of David Weinrib, Fredrick Keisler and Mark Di Suvero energize the observer's space and indeed encompass him. On a pictorial scale, the combine-paintings of Rauschenberg and Johns utilize objects extending from the surface of paintings and intruding upon the spectator's space; such objects act as transitions between illusion and reality, between the actual and the visionary experience.
In its environmental aspects, Pistoletto's work is closely related to that of the American sculptor George Segal whose calcified plaster personages reside in the mystically transformed atmosphere of bedrooms, kitchens, butcher shops and roadside cafes. With his isolated figures and objects Pistoletto creates a similar quality of limbo. His closest relationship in concept is with Segal because, as Pistoletto puts it "we both consider life from the aspect of the human figure." Unlike Pop artist's treatment of the figure, in which commentary, even irony, prevails, Pistoletto's personages, like Segal's, are classicized and bemused images. For all its specificity, his art moves toward a stillness and once the spectator-participant has habituated himself to the disquieting experience of sharing a space with these images, that space is irrevocably transformed.
"The right kind of spectator," Pistoletto feels, "is the one who complies with the conditions imposed by reality and, consequently, establishes contact with himself, with the painted figures and hence with me -- all in a simple act of availability." He wants the observer to enter his paintings through self-recognition and so provides him with a mirrored surface. The work of art becomes the "fiction most closely related to reality," and the individual's first experience with the work of art must be to find himself in it. Pistoletto attempts to extend the observer's experience beyond the conventional confines of even a highly illusionistic work of art and so to involve him in the act of creation. Because of definite referents in the form of painted figures and objects on these reflecting surfaces, the observer's space is transformed in a hallucinatory manner. He becomes aware of a certain presence or presences which stand between himself and his reflection and thus Pistoletto's expression becomes one of limitless possibilities, not only of space but of psychological import.
The phenomenon of the "happening," theatre pieces which actively utilize specific surrounding in which the audience becomes the vitalizing element, is one of the most controversial forms of recent art. In many aspects, the happening is an extension of the environmental idea and is influenced by theatre, dance and cinema, whose methods it freely draws upon (and, in some cases, is affecting in return). Pistoletto's works are extensions of these concepts and, while he has never participated in a happening, he is strongly interested in generating a spontaneous event which occurs as the observer enters the picture.
Although a cinematic quality is apparent in Pistoletto's cool imagery, he has little interest in the language of the film. He recognizes that his pictures are "screens representing images in motion without the necessity of machinery to record and project them." Nevertheless, elements in his paintings, particularly the disengaged quality of his figures separated from each other and their environments, evoke the films of Resnais and Antonioni. These directors explore the symbolic and psychological properties of objects and their work is as much imbued with revelation of such mysteries as with literalism. Psychological values, the alienation of the individual from his surrounding and his time are some of the common denominators of their approaches and Pistoletto's.
He argues that a scientific method in art provides the necessary attitudes with which to confront an even more depersonalized life and this can be construed as a partial defense of his detached view and a support for the utilization of seemingly impersonal techniques and media. Pistoletto's imagery is only in part innovative. He does not particularly disturb our own situation and his personages do not readily impinge on our world; they do not even regard it. But, it is precisely because of the detachment of his subjects that they become part of our ambience, quietly and insistently. He want his figures to "hold themselves available for anything that might happen." With the spectator, they share "an intimacy of the moment."
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