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Lot Essay
‘This youngster named Michelangelo Pistoletto, one cannot say that he is a Pop painter as someone has said, and if someone hasn’t said it, better be clear that this guy has nothing to do with Pop because in Turin, as probably in all of Italy, the premises for Pop painting do not exist, there is only this oppressive and invincible weight, no American Coke, no Vermouth Perlino, no vamps, not much use of deodorant, people still sleep in their pyjamas, people still cook pasta, squeeze the tomatoes, people still do all those things. At the Bar Torino on Piazza San Carlo you sit on little baroque chairs to eat lots of gelato but not much “ice-cream.” Thus I would say that this boy from Turin is a true poet, even if perhaps less incisive and caustic than the boys from New York, the Lichtensteins, the Rosenquists, the Rauschenbergs, the Oldenburgs, and the Chamberlains, in recounting to us the conditions of our own drama, our own story.’
ETTORE SOTTSASS
‘For centuries we have been projecting ourselves into the fictional space of painting. I thought it was time to have the space project out to us, to once again create space’
M. PISTOLETTO
‘Pistoletto’s work is an apotheosis of the ordinary’, wrote Martin Friedman in his introduction to the Walker Art Center’s first major show of Pistoletto’s work entitled ‘Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Reflected World’ in April 1966. Ficus of 1965 is one of a series of mirror paintings depicting a domestic and commonplace pot-plant that were made in preparation for this landmark exhibition of the artist’s work.
‘Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Reflected World’ comprised entirely of numerous examples of the mirror-paintings that had dominated Pistoletto’s art since his famous breakthrough of 1962. Ranging from anonymous portraits and unremarkable images drawn from mundane aspects of daily Italian life, to pictures of ordinary people demonstrating and marching in protest, the subjects of Pistoletto’s mirror-paintings in this exhibition appeared to deliberately provide a contemporary cross-section of average, day-to-day, bourgeois life in 1960s Italy.
Among the mirror paintings that Pistoletto made for this show were three depicting household pot-plants of the kind found in many domestic interiors at the time. These were the 1965 paintings, Philodendro (now in the Albright- Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), Autoritratto con pianta (Self-portrait with a Potted Plant) and Ficus (Fig plant) similar to the present work. In addition to these three works, Pistoletto had also placed various real potted plants at various stages throughout the exhibition space, so that their presence was often reflected in many of the other mirror-paintings on view, adding to the whole interior a strange sense of continuity between his paintings’ subject-matter and their environment.
Ficus of 1965, therefore, is a work that encapsulates all these concerns within its simple hand-coloured paper image of a fashionable house-plant laid down on a polished stainless-steel reflective surface. A humorous modern take on the still-life tradition in painting, it is also a work that, with its depiction of a single plant in a pot functions as both a decorative addition to an interior - like a pot-plant itself - and as an interactive work that projects such domestic taste and values onto the viewer whose self-image will appear reflected alongside the plant whenever the painting is viewed. As with all of Pistoletto’s mirror-paintings, it is, in this way that the work both breaks down traditional artistic barriers and opens itself to the possibility of theatre, one in which the viewer becomes the performer in a stage-set orchestrated by Pistoletto’s choice of subject matter; in this case a deliberately common-or-garden Ficus plant. It is this aspect of these works that Pistoletto explores, for example, in the mirror-painting Autoritratto con pianta where he depicts an image of himself interacting with the house-plant, using the plinth on which it stands to tie his shoe-laces. As Pistoletto once pointed out, these paintings were created as works with which to interact. ‘The mirror paintings could not live without an audience’ he once said. ‘They were created and re-created according to the movement and to the interventions they reproduced. The step from the mirror paintings to theatre - everything is theatre - seems simply natural...It is less a matter of involving the audience, of letting it participate, as to act on its freedom and on its imagination, to trigger similar liberation mechanisms in people.’(M. PISTOLETTO)
ETTORE SOTTSASS
‘For centuries we have been projecting ourselves into the fictional space of painting. I thought it was time to have the space project out to us, to once again create space’
M. PISTOLETTO
‘Pistoletto’s work is an apotheosis of the ordinary’, wrote Martin Friedman in his introduction to the Walker Art Center’s first major show of Pistoletto’s work entitled ‘Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Reflected World’ in April 1966. Ficus of 1965 is one of a series of mirror paintings depicting a domestic and commonplace pot-plant that were made in preparation for this landmark exhibition of the artist’s work.
‘Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Reflected World’ comprised entirely of numerous examples of the mirror-paintings that had dominated Pistoletto’s art since his famous breakthrough of 1962. Ranging from anonymous portraits and unremarkable images drawn from mundane aspects of daily Italian life, to pictures of ordinary people demonstrating and marching in protest, the subjects of Pistoletto’s mirror-paintings in this exhibition appeared to deliberately provide a contemporary cross-section of average, day-to-day, bourgeois life in 1960s Italy.
Among the mirror paintings that Pistoletto made for this show were three depicting household pot-plants of the kind found in many domestic interiors at the time. These were the 1965 paintings, Philodendro (now in the Albright- Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), Autoritratto con pianta (Self-portrait with a Potted Plant) and Ficus (Fig plant) similar to the present work. In addition to these three works, Pistoletto had also placed various real potted plants at various stages throughout the exhibition space, so that their presence was often reflected in many of the other mirror-paintings on view, adding to the whole interior a strange sense of continuity between his paintings’ subject-matter and their environment.
Ficus of 1965, therefore, is a work that encapsulates all these concerns within its simple hand-coloured paper image of a fashionable house-plant laid down on a polished stainless-steel reflective surface. A humorous modern take on the still-life tradition in painting, it is also a work that, with its depiction of a single plant in a pot functions as both a decorative addition to an interior - like a pot-plant itself - and as an interactive work that projects such domestic taste and values onto the viewer whose self-image will appear reflected alongside the plant whenever the painting is viewed. As with all of Pistoletto’s mirror-paintings, it is, in this way that the work both breaks down traditional artistic barriers and opens itself to the possibility of theatre, one in which the viewer becomes the performer in a stage-set orchestrated by Pistoletto’s choice of subject matter; in this case a deliberately common-or-garden Ficus plant. It is this aspect of these works that Pistoletto explores, for example, in the mirror-painting Autoritratto con pianta where he depicts an image of himself interacting with the house-plant, using the plinth on which it stands to tie his shoe-laces. As Pistoletto once pointed out, these paintings were created as works with which to interact. ‘The mirror paintings could not live without an audience’ he once said. ‘They were created and re-created according to the movement and to the interventions they reproduced. The step from the mirror paintings to theatre - everything is theatre - seems simply natural...It is less a matter of involving the audience, of letting it participate, as to act on its freedom and on its imagination, to trigger similar liberation mechanisms in people.’(M. PISTOLETTO)