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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a certificate signed by the artist.
The Mark of Zorro is emblazoned across a green canvas - the outlaw has struck again, the dashing vigilante... However this is not the swashbuckling hero of Spanish California, but instead Maurizio Cattelan. With deliberate glibness, Cattelan has plundered the story of Zorro, placing his mark on the canvas: the High Art medium of oil on canvas has been punctured and attacked by Low Art. Like the comic strips transformed into Pop Art early in Warhol's career, Cattelan has superimposed popular culture onto the hallowed and conservative support of traditional art. He has both defiled and democratised the opaque world of contemporary art. In Untitled (Zorro), the cavalier contemporary artist has created an amusing and iconic calling-card, a visual manifesto and declaration of war against the hypocrisy of art, the art market, and art viewers. The presence of the Mark of Zorro within our circle implies that we are under threat of his retribution, of the outlaw's sense of justice.
Cattelan's humorous slashes are aimed at deflating the pomp and inaccessibility of conceptual art, and especially the paintings of Lucio Fontana. The esteemed godfather of Italian conceptual art, the venerated creator of Spatialism, is aped and insulted in Cattelan's slashes. In Untitled (Zorro), he has deliberately taken the venerated visual idiom of Fontana's paintings and punctured it, cheapening it, likening it to nothing more than a childhood game of imitation, of cowboys and Indians. Cattelan has deftly brought about a concise and even calligraphic union between a cerebral and pioneering artist and a pulp character, between 'High' and 'Low' art.
The Mark of Zorro is emblazoned across a green canvas - the outlaw has struck again, the dashing vigilante... However this is not the swashbuckling hero of Spanish California, but instead Maurizio Cattelan. With deliberate glibness, Cattelan has plundered the story of Zorro, placing his mark on the canvas: the High Art medium of oil on canvas has been punctured and attacked by Low Art. Like the comic strips transformed into Pop Art early in Warhol's career, Cattelan has superimposed popular culture onto the hallowed and conservative support of traditional art. He has both defiled and democratised the opaque world of contemporary art. In Untitled (Zorro), the cavalier contemporary artist has created an amusing and iconic calling-card, a visual manifesto and declaration of war against the hypocrisy of art, the art market, and art viewers. The presence of the Mark of Zorro within our circle implies that we are under threat of his retribution, of the outlaw's sense of justice.
Cattelan's humorous slashes are aimed at deflating the pomp and inaccessibility of conceptual art, and especially the paintings of Lucio Fontana. The esteemed godfather of Italian conceptual art, the venerated creator of Spatialism, is aped and insulted in Cattelan's slashes. In Untitled (Zorro), he has deliberately taken the venerated visual idiom of Fontana's paintings and punctured it, cheapening it, likening it to nothing more than a childhood game of imitation, of cowboys and Indians. Cattelan has deftly brought about a concise and even calligraphic union between a cerebral and pioneering artist and a pulp character, between 'High' and 'Low' art.