Exhibitions
Pistoletto. Metaphor of immediacy
In an unstable world where crises multiply and no concept endures, culture and, specifically, museums must accept a different role than they have played in previous eras. They must redefine themselves, like so many other things, and face the challenges posed by society. For this reason, MUSAC's decision to present an exhibition by Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933) offers a fitting opportunity to learn about the work of an artist who approaches his creations from the need to contribute to transforming the world, not just representing it. In a journey spanning from 1957 to 2025, visitors will be able to see around fifty works of painting, installations, sculpture, performance, and video, and very especially, the well-known Quadri specchianti.
His work does not start from a point anchored solely in the present but seeks the necessary roots to explain why we have arrived at the place where we are. For Pistoletto, the history of art and the evolution of the approaches to representing the world must be considered to take a step further in understanding the way we look at everything around us. Pistoletto built his radicalism in a deep communion with the history of art and the tradition of the European scene. His interpretative work on the evolution of perspective that has traversed European art since the 14th century has allowed him to reach a transformation in the representation of the act of seeing, turning the pictorial work into a living experience where reality and fiction, the interior and the exterior, the path from expression to representation are recomposed, as Germano Celant defined, to become a "metaphor of immediate knowledge."
To do this, Pistoletto turns the mirror into a key reference in his work. He places us before an element that embraces and returns to us any action that the present unfolds in the represented space. As Antonio d’Avossa indicated (M.P. El mirall i la perspectiva del revers, introduction to the exhibition catalog L’arquitectura del Mirall, Pistoletto, Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, 1990): “The inversion of perspective made by Pistoletto substitutes knowledge with praxis, experience with freedom, mediation with the will of the immediate... Reaffirming the triumph of a set of human relationships based on three poles: participation, communication, realization. To invert perspective is to stop seeing with the eyes of the community, ideology, family, others. It is to take possession of oneself in solidarity, to choose oneself as a starting point and as a center.”
A radicalism necessary to break schemes and create new ways of seeing, to help us question what we catalog as immovable realities and to become aware of our actions through the works of an artist who has never been subject to fashions or precepts, even during his phase when he was considered the foremost representative of Arte Povera, especially with the work Venere degli stracci, from 1967.
In our society, dominated by virtual images, the questions raised by his works about the role of the spectator —who enters and exits the artwork, becoming both representative and represented—, about the consumerism surrounding us, and about art as a collective process become a call to reflection.
The exhibition, curated by Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, proposes a review of the ideas that run through his entire oeuvre: time, identity, spectator participation, and the social function of art, to make us understand that, more important than what is represented, is what has been lived.
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