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Lot Essay
'I believe that the term "time" is fundamental to the understanding of my work. There is a difference between my work and "art" in its traditional sense: my goal is not just two dimensions, not just three, but four dimensions...In traditional painting, representation and drawing cover the entire surface. This is a static aspect which has come down through the years as a univocal signal. It can correspond to the figure that I place on the surfaces of the mirror paintings...But in my mirror paintings the image coexists with every present moment'. (Pistoletto, quoted in G. Celant, Michelangelo Pistoletto, New York, 1989, p. 31).
Michelangelo Pistoletto's Leggio presents the viewer with the image of a music stand shown against a mirrored, steel background. The simple structure of the stand appears almost abstract in its near-geometry, rigid and formal. However, it is emphatically figurative, an empty stand awaiting a musician and a score. And the potential musicians are the viewers who stand before the mirror and are reflected in it, incorporated within the ever-shifting display of the passing world.
The stand is poignantly empty, yet this also speaks of potential, of the music that may yet come. In this way, Pistoletto's Leggio echoes the concerns of some of Jannis Kounellis's works, which sometimes
featured snatches of music shown on paintings, even with a musician to play them. Music stands also featured in another iconic work from one of Pistoletto's contemporaries, another associate of Arte Povera, Giulio Paolini. For it was only a few years before Leggio was created that Paolini made his Apoteosi di Omero; in that installation, the music stands featured images of actors depicting historical characters. Here in Leggio, by contrast, the stand awaits its activation by the viewer.
The emptiness of the music stand is fitting in one of Pistoletto's Mirror Paintings, as in some ways they were a reaction to the sense of clutter that he felt had invaded so much contemporary art. With the focus of the Informel artists on the material and other expressionistic painters on the brushstroke, he sought a way of removing himself from that field, and indeed producing an attack upon it. Accordingly, instead of the vigorous, hazard-embracing painting of Francis Bacon, in response to whom Pistoletto created the self-portraits that led to the inception of his Mirror Paintings, here we have instead a crisp sheet of polished steel with a highly realistic image transferred onto its surface, allowing an intense objectivity that is only heightened by the reflected presence of the 'real' world of the viewer behind the stand.
The theme of music implied by the stand in Leggio emphasises the importance of time to Pistoletto's Mirror Paintings. As music involves a process, it takes and therefore evokes time. Pistoletto himself was increasingly involving time in his works during the 1970s, carrying out more and more performances. The Mirror Paintings had anticipated this: they had already been considered a form of static happening. Pistoletto himself underlined the importance of time in Leggio and its sister pictures.
Michelangelo Pistoletto's Leggio presents the viewer with the image of a music stand shown against a mirrored, steel background. The simple structure of the stand appears almost abstract in its near-geometry, rigid and formal. However, it is emphatically figurative, an empty stand awaiting a musician and a score. And the potential musicians are the viewers who stand before the mirror and are reflected in it, incorporated within the ever-shifting display of the passing world.
The stand is poignantly empty, yet this also speaks of potential, of the music that may yet come. In this way, Pistoletto's Leggio echoes the concerns of some of Jannis Kounellis's works, which sometimes
featured snatches of music shown on paintings, even with a musician to play them. Music stands also featured in another iconic work from one of Pistoletto's contemporaries, another associate of Arte Povera, Giulio Paolini. For it was only a few years before Leggio was created that Paolini made his Apoteosi di Omero; in that installation, the music stands featured images of actors depicting historical characters. Here in Leggio, by contrast, the stand awaits its activation by the viewer.
The emptiness of the music stand is fitting in one of Pistoletto's Mirror Paintings, as in some ways they were a reaction to the sense of clutter that he felt had invaded so much contemporary art. With the focus of the Informel artists on the material and other expressionistic painters on the brushstroke, he sought a way of removing himself from that field, and indeed producing an attack upon it. Accordingly, instead of the vigorous, hazard-embracing painting of Francis Bacon, in response to whom Pistoletto created the self-portraits that led to the inception of his Mirror Paintings, here we have instead a crisp sheet of polished steel with a highly realistic image transferred onto its surface, allowing an intense objectivity that is only heightened by the reflected presence of the 'real' world of the viewer behind the stand.
The theme of music implied by the stand in Leggio emphasises the importance of time to Pistoletto's Mirror Paintings. As music involves a process, it takes and therefore evokes time. Pistoletto himself was increasingly involving time in his works during the 1970s, carrying out more and more performances. The Mirror Paintings had anticipated this: they had already been considered a form of static happening. Pistoletto himself underlined the importance of time in Leggio and its sister pictures.