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Lot Essay
Painted on tissue paper laid down on the highly reflective stainless steel surface of the picture, Boy with a Dog is an early mirror-painting made by Pistoletto at the height of his involvement with this medium in 1965. This was the year when, following a visit to New York and encounters with Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg, Pistoletto had first began to distance himself from the Pop art scene in America with which his first mirror-painting portraits had first been associated. It was also the year in which Pistoletto first met Pino Pascali and began to forge with him a creative union between Turin and Rome that was to expand into the arte povera tendency in Italy two years later.
Depicting a young boy and his dog looking up towards an unseen figure to the right, this mirror-painting is a particularly animated example from this famous series of works. For here, in a rare instance, the figures are shown frozen in the action of engaging with the viewer. Pistoletto has arranged the composition of Boy with a Dog in such a way that the ‘frozen moment’ carried by the photographic image of the boy and the dog is contrasted with the active, animate presence of the viewer whose reflected image, when looking at the work, appears, in the mirror, as if it were the subject of the boy and his dog’s attention.
The animated and interactive nature of the subject of this painting came about, almost by accident, as Pistoletto recalls writing: ‘I made an appointment at Paolo Bressano’s photo studio with a gentleman who wanted a mirror painting of his young son with his pet dog. I set the boy with the dog on his lead in front of the camera. The photographer snapped the picture just as the dog stretched forward towards his master (not in the frame) dragging the child on the leash.’ (Michelangelo Pistoletto quoted in Francesca Pola, Michelangelo Pistoletto The Unexpected Image, exh. cat., Frieze Masters, London, 2013, unpaged).
Pistoletto recognized an inherent magic in the contrast between the frozen dynamism of the boy and the dog - caught by the photograph and yet trapped in time - and the real dynamism of the viewer’s reflected presence - animated and existing in real time, and yet also caught in a suggestive interaction with the fixed imagery of the work,. In Boy with a Dog, he has sought to generate a dynamic sense of this interaction between two different realities coinciding within his picture and the way in which they are indicative of different spatial and temporal realms. As Boy with a Dog illustrates, Pistoletto saw here the possibility for a development of the entire concept of his mirror-paintings into a wider space-time field. This was a discovery that would lead towards the end of 1965 to the creation of his Oggetti in meno or Minus-Objects. These were strange objects, Pistoletto said, that he had made while imagining himself in the space-time zone of his mirror paintings
Reflecting on the genesis of these works and on the mystery of mirror-paintings like Boy with a Dog, Pistoletto wrote in 1966: ‘In my mirror-paintings the dynamic reflection does not create a place, because it only reflects a place which already exists - the static silhouette does no more than re-propose an already existing place. But I can create a place by bringing about a passage between the photograph and the mirror: this place is whole time. If the film frame could carry out another movement in addition to its interrupted gesture, there would be a new time between the two movements; but this does not come about, so the film frame represents a maximum of slowness. The reflection is simultaneous with the real image - there is no time between a body and its reflection in a mirror: if the reflection occurred an instant before or after the presence of the body, it would be possible to measure the velocity of the image in becoming a reflection, but this does not happen. In the case of a mirror the image is so fast as to be body and reflection simultaneously, thus representing a maximum of speed. In the distance-in-time between the film frame (minimum velocity) and the reflection (maximum velocity), all possible places and all possible times exist. But because the two extremes coincide in the picture, we perceive, simultaneously, the cancelling of all created places and times at the moment of their creation. Past and future simply do not come into this process. All that remains of my action in any given moment are the materials and the language;… Just as no space is occupied by the relationship between the silhouette and the mirror (although the entirety of existing time is suggested) so each new work comes about as though it were inside the space between the paper of the film frame and the mirror of the previous pictures. The artistic act must contain an individual dynamic system.’ (Michelangelo Pistoletto Minus Objects, exh cat, Genova, 1966).
Depicting a young boy and his dog looking up towards an unseen figure to the right, this mirror-painting is a particularly animated example from this famous series of works. For here, in a rare instance, the figures are shown frozen in the action of engaging with the viewer. Pistoletto has arranged the composition of Boy with a Dog in such a way that the ‘frozen moment’ carried by the photographic image of the boy and the dog is contrasted with the active, animate presence of the viewer whose reflected image, when looking at the work, appears, in the mirror, as if it were the subject of the boy and his dog’s attention.
The animated and interactive nature of the subject of this painting came about, almost by accident, as Pistoletto recalls writing: ‘I made an appointment at Paolo Bressano’s photo studio with a gentleman who wanted a mirror painting of his young son with his pet dog. I set the boy with the dog on his lead in front of the camera. The photographer snapped the picture just as the dog stretched forward towards his master (not in the frame) dragging the child on the leash.’ (Michelangelo Pistoletto quoted in Francesca Pola, Michelangelo Pistoletto The Unexpected Image, exh. cat., Frieze Masters, London, 2013, unpaged).
Pistoletto recognized an inherent magic in the contrast between the frozen dynamism of the boy and the dog - caught by the photograph and yet trapped in time - and the real dynamism of the viewer’s reflected presence - animated and existing in real time, and yet also caught in a suggestive interaction with the fixed imagery of the work,. In Boy with a Dog, he has sought to generate a dynamic sense of this interaction between two different realities coinciding within his picture and the way in which they are indicative of different spatial and temporal realms. As Boy with a Dog illustrates, Pistoletto saw here the possibility for a development of the entire concept of his mirror-paintings into a wider space-time field. This was a discovery that would lead towards the end of 1965 to the creation of his Oggetti in meno or Minus-Objects. These were strange objects, Pistoletto said, that he had made while imagining himself in the space-time zone of his mirror paintings
Reflecting on the genesis of these works and on the mystery of mirror-paintings like Boy with a Dog, Pistoletto wrote in 1966: ‘In my mirror-paintings the dynamic reflection does not create a place, because it only reflects a place which already exists - the static silhouette does no more than re-propose an already existing place. But I can create a place by bringing about a passage between the photograph and the mirror: this place is whole time. If the film frame could carry out another movement in addition to its interrupted gesture, there would be a new time between the two movements; but this does not come about, so the film frame represents a maximum of slowness. The reflection is simultaneous with the real image - there is no time between a body and its reflection in a mirror: if the reflection occurred an instant before or after the presence of the body, it would be possible to measure the velocity of the image in becoming a reflection, but this does not happen. In the case of a mirror the image is so fast as to be body and reflection simultaneously, thus representing a maximum of speed. In the distance-in-time between the film frame (minimum velocity) and the reflection (maximum velocity), all possible places and all possible times exist. But because the two extremes coincide in the picture, we perceive, simultaneously, the cancelling of all created places and times at the moment of their creation. Past and future simply do not come into this process. All that remains of my action in any given moment are the materials and the language;… Just as no space is occupied by the relationship between the silhouette and the mirror (although the entirety of existing time is suggested) so each new work comes about as though it were inside the space between the paper of the film frame and the mirror of the previous pictures. The artistic act must contain an individual dynamic system.’ (Michelangelo Pistoletto Minus Objects, exh cat, Genova, 1966).