coated on the inside with black mirror. 100 x 80 x 9 cm
Ιn a 1993 discussion, Michelangelo Pistoletto and curator Denys Zacharopoulos addressed the entire sphere of issues surrounding the necessity of a spiritual dialogue between art and life that the Italian artist had begun many years earlier. Pistoletto sees this life as a mirror of all forms of truth, regardless of how complex this truth seems and from whatever angle it appears.
M.P: … I once wrote that “in order to create, we need to be two”. This “two” can also be the artist and the public. Or, in a non-art context, it can be an individual and his friends or society. But the work of art is also the second one, the other. It is the possibility to reflect yourself like a mirror ― to give your image back to yourself ― if you reach the zero point of the mirror.
D.Z: You did that back in 1960. You put a mirror in front of yourself in order to reach zero. [In 1972 you placed a transparent sliding glass barrier between yourself and the mirror.] But in 1992, you added a portrait of yourself made through your father, a video that your daughter made of herself, a statue, an ancient road in front of a contemporary road, a private house in front of a museum, a bed in front of a couch, a chair in front of a table, and so on. This means that what the mirror was for you in 1960 can now be accomplished with a lot of different things that function as a mirror, but create much more complex relationships. They really enter the mirror. As you said back in ’65 (Oggetti in Memo – Minus Objects) or in ’68 (The Last Famous Words), the dimension of the mirror is actually all that mirror can embrace.
M.P: That’s because in ’61, when I did my first mirror painting, I brought my person to the zero point. What I mean is that there was no longer any distance between myself and the surface. I was on the surface ― the surface that is the end and the beginning of space. I had to find the distance from the surface. [In 1972, by placing an intermediate space between myself and the mirror, I activated a converse view of the truth whereby aspects of reality emerge, redefining the conversional relationship of the present to the past and the future.] Now I’m 32 years into the mirror. In other words, by moving away from the surface of the mirror, I went deeper in space and time, in life, transforming into density the reflection and concept of the mirror…