The study of the (divided and multiplicated) mirror

"It might seem weird, but in the beginning - that is, in the 1950’s - I had focused all my attention upon myself, that is, on self-portrait. To see myself I had to look into a mirror. My problem was how to transfer my presence from the physical level into the mirror and then onto the canvas; in other words, how to bring it into that conceptual space which was supposed to give me an answer. In 1961, after having worked on it for a long time, I came to a solution: I painted a canvas completely black and then on the black I put a thick layer of paint - the canvas became a reflecting surface. When I started painting my image on it, I was surprised to see it facing me and coming towards me as if floating freely in the air. For the first time, I could copy myself looking at me on the canvas and not in the mirror standing beside it. So the two things, the canvas and the mirror, had become one. This fact had such deep implications that I had to start interpreting it.". This is how Michelangelo Pistoletto explains the origin of his first works, which date back to the ten years between the beginning of the 1950’s and the beginning of the 1960’s and which show a male figure against a black, gold or silver compact monochromatic background. Celant indicates the distorted silhouettes of Bacon as the main reference point for these first works by Pistoletto; but he also points out the neutral and almost impersonal way of displaying them employed by Pistoletto (1). It is, as if the latter aims at making Bacon’s anguish objective.There is only a short way from these works to the reflecting surfaces, as the artist himself explains in his own words. "In 1962 I transformed the reflecting canvas into a steel mirror and then, looking for a shape which had the same qualities of the image reflected in the mirror, I found that the closest thing resembling it was the photograph. By means of this solution, the picture involved the onlooker letting him/her enter into the picture, which became his/her portrait as well. "The mirror is a boundary where the finite and the infinite come together and merge, where past and present, art and life are united. From the point of view of the figure caught within the picture, the work looks always the same; but if we consider the flow of images which it catches in a series of unsteady moments, then it is always different. As Celant remarks, in the work there is a swaying between representation and existence, without a definite choice being made. Ultimately, the mirror is always a latent self-portrait: the first image that was reflected in it was that of the artist. Self-portrait is the mirror-stage in painting, it is the moment of the identification, of the acceptance of the image. But the self looking at the mirror sees itself as divided and multiplied; the mirror becomes the place where there is a splitting, a division; what the artist sees in the mirror is not a metaphor or an analogical image but rather a continuous flow of metonymies, a series of portions of life which move on beyond the limits of the picture. At this point, Pistoletto decided to invade the external space which he had previously tried to comprehend within the picture ("so it happened that I was thrown into the crowd, that is, into the situation that we all experience in our everyday life. This is the outcoming of my discovery of the world surrounding my self-portrait in the mirror."). Divisione e moltiplicazione dello specchio ("Division and Multiplication of the Mirror") is the title of a few works dating back to the 1970’s in which the mirror is split and put together into different unities that are often arranged at an angle, so that new possibilities of reflecting and refracting are created. To realize his project for the balcony of the cloister of Palazzo Minucci-Solaini, the Pinacoteca of the ancient city of Volterra, Pistoletto drew inspiration precisely from this concept. The project is a series of five differently arranged tree-trunks. It is a strange coincidence that on the invitation for the exhibition there was a series of five trees which was taken from a work by Beato Angelico, the artist who tried to establish a correspondence between the Creator, the Creation and the creatures and who expressed the analogies exhisting between nature and culture by means, for instance, of a parallelism between the tree and the human body. These secret coincidences are an essential part of the spirit of the exhibition, which aims at re-establishing a relationship between the artists and the cities, renewing the ties to the artistic tradition of the past while thinking of the future. The first tree-trunk is divided into two halves and has a reflecting surface on the inside; the second one is cut at a 90° angle and is covered by two mirrors which look as if they were four, due to refraction. This reflection ranging from one to the infinite is present even where we can’t see it, inside matter. Just like the mind is within the body, so reflection exists within the tree, within nature’s body. The more the cutting angle becomes narrow, the more the mirror gets multiplied, until the tree-trunk closes again letting the two mirrors join and coincide - and the reflection disappears. The two mirrors reflecting each other create again a cylider inside that corresponds to the external cylindrical shape: on the outside we have a virtual reflection of the inside. While we are performing an apparently definitive gesture, that of closing the angle, the reflection aims at the infinite and we can foresee this, for we know from before that there exists a multiplication. In the end we are reconstructing the tree-trunk as a section of a living organism, but we are aware now of the fact that its interiority is a reflecting surface. There is a previous work which closely reminds of this one: it is a 6-mt.-high tree with a diameter of 1 mt. to which Pistoletto had inferted a specular cut. There are also older works which can be considered as precedents to this. "In 1961 he created his Metro cubo d’infinito ("One cubic meter of infinite") in which six mirrors were arranged facing inside. The different stages of the carrying out of the operation (of which a photographic documentation exists) revealed how the refraction possibilities of the various mirrors increased constantly when they were put close to each other in succession, till they reached the infinite. By placing the last mirror the infinite was ultimately closed within itself in the shape of a cube, which doesn’t show but its own volume. A work dating back to the year 1976 and entitled Corona di specchi ("Crown of mirrors") represents the opposite solution: eight slabs are placed in a sunburst arrangement around a centre, and each of the angles formed by the stones displays in exactly the same way the open octagonal structure. The internal section reflects the whole of the external appearance of the work (isn’t there perhaps an analogous relationship between the mind’s reflection and its objects?)" (2) Another work which deserves mentioning is that of the pieces of furniture turned upside-down, with mirrors on their bottoms which would be invisible if the armchairs and chests of drawers were positioned correctly. But there could also be less explicit references. The relationship between past and present is the theme of one version of the work Le Stanze ("The Rooms"), in which a series of thresholds follow one another; each of them bears the word "figlio" ("son"), but at the end of the row there is a mirror which reflects the word "padre" ("father") written on the back of the doors. In another work, Pistoletto makes use of a portrait his father made of him when he was three months old; he considers it as his first self-portrait and considers his father as a mirror. In the work inVolterra we can see the same method of turning things inside out by means of the reflection, but the area where the mirror is placed is extremely significant: the inside of the tree is precisely the part of it bearing the marks of time, it is the part which gives a visual indication, through the series of growth rings, of the age of the tree. The setting is therefore the past, the progressive scansion of the years. At first Pistoletto had thought of exhibiting a 1979 work in the Sala de Witte-Pomarancio; it is entitled Le Tavole della Legge ("The Tables of the Law") and it is a reflecting work composed of two elements set side by side. This diptych was based upon three aspects: an ideal socle upon which to place the Tavole della Legge; the iconographic sacredness of the paintings in the room; the peculiar shape with an arched top typical of the altarpieces, of the doors and of the windows. The new project is more dynamic, though, for it follows the develoopment of the sequences, it includes the relationship with nature and it makes the playing with specular reflections in space and time more complex.Notes
1) G. Celant, Reflections of Lava in Pistoletto.Division and Multiplication of the Mirror catalogue for the exhibition edited by G. Celant and A. Heiss, P.S. 1, New York 1988
2) C. Ferrari, Michelangelo Pistoletto in Luoghi del silenzio imparziale, catalogue for the exhibition edited by A. Benito Oliva, Palazzo della Permanente, Milano 1981, page 118
* There is a play on the word "occhio" in the name, which is also the Italian word for "eye"; the meaning will be clarified in the text [Note of the Translator].
**** The author of the text is referring to one of the characters in the tale Pinocchio - [Note of the Translator]
** In the Italian text there is the expression "covare con gli occhi", in which the word "covare" has the double meaning of "laying" - an egg - and "cherishing, looking lovingly at". The pun is untranslatable. [Note of the Translator].
*** The Italian idiom "It’s like the egg of Columbus" means "It’s the obvious solution" to an apparently difficult problem. [Note of the Translator].