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Lot Essay
Executed in 1970, Il cordone presents the viewer with the simplest of devices: a rope, signifying our exclusion from the world beyond it. This is the type of rope that is seen protecting museum exhibits from the roaming hands of gallery visitors or equally as a barrier outside a nightclub, enforcing the exclusivity of the clientele. And who do we see on the other side of the cordon, in the chosen grass-is-always-greener land that lies in the Looking Glass, but a twisted reflection of ourselves? Somehow, our reflection has been granted into an exclusive realm from which we are forever excluded. And at the same time, our reflections have been converted, and have become an artwork from which we have been blockaded.
Pistoletto's Mirror Paintings derived in part from his earlier interest in portraiture and self-portraiture. In his paintings, he had been fascinated by Francis Bacon. The strange and haunting frames within the composition that trapped and contained Bacon's subjects have been inverted in Pistoletto's rectangle of polished steel, which imposes its own frame on the ever-shifting scene of the viewer's own world. This is both a form of capture and release, with the viewer perceiving him- or herself at large in an entire new universe. And where Bacon's paintings captured the subject in one anguished moment, Pistoletto's work is inclusive, is democratic, and charts the movements and changes in the world before it, channelling the dynamism of the world around us.
And all this happens within a picture that is essentially of a simple rope... The inclusion of this work amidst a collection of still life paintings by prominent twentieth-century Italian artists shows wit on the part of the collector as well as on the part of the artist. For while this one element does indeed strictly-speaking constitute a still life painting, its mirrored surface creates an ever-shifting tableau vivant showing the inverted viewer and the surrounding world.
Pistoletto's Mirror Paintings derived in part from his earlier interest in portraiture and self-portraiture. In his paintings, he had been fascinated by Francis Bacon. The strange and haunting frames within the composition that trapped and contained Bacon's subjects have been inverted in Pistoletto's rectangle of polished steel, which imposes its own frame on the ever-shifting scene of the viewer's own world. This is both a form of capture and release, with the viewer perceiving him- or herself at large in an entire new universe. And where Bacon's paintings captured the subject in one anguished moment, Pistoletto's work is inclusive, is democratic, and charts the movements and changes in the world before it, channelling the dynamism of the world around us.
And all this happens within a picture that is essentially of a simple rope... The inclusion of this work amidst a collection of still life paintings by prominent twentieth-century Italian artists shows wit on the part of the collector as well as on the part of the artist. For while this one element does indeed strictly-speaking constitute a still life painting, its mirrored surface creates an ever-shifting tableau vivant showing the inverted viewer and the surrounding world.