MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO, PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU

Alternative Centers offers a unique creative dialogue between two contemporary visions of art represented by the works of Michelangelo Pistoletto and Pascale Marthine Tayou. As the title refers to an idea of collective identity, the exhibition creates a social dimension of encounter and discovery, bringing together the two artists’ centres of interest. The creation of art that is open to dialogue and exchange is undoubtedly the strongest link uniting these two artists, one which would be tested for the first time in 2019 at the exhibition Una cosa non esclude l’altra—One thing doesn’t exclude the other presented by GALLERIA CONTINUA in San Gimignano, Italy. For this exhibition, Michelangelo Pistoletto is presenting the series Black and Light and Color and Light.

Begun in 2007 and 2014 respectively, they explore the relationship between colour and light. As the first series is the precursor to the second, the two series form a chronological exhibition on the transition from non-colour (black) to colour. It also traces the themes that run through the artist’s entire oeuvre, from his upbringing with his restorer father, to his first pictorial works, not to mention his links with Arte Povera, the main post-war Italian artistic movement favouring the use of simple materials. The mirror, an omnipresent medium in the artist’s practice, which he sees as a container for infinity, is present in Black and Light and Color and Light in fragmentary form.

Michelangelo Pistoletto has this to say about the Color and Light series:

It’s a work of broken mirrors, but executed in an ordered way. The contours produced by breaking the mirror itself are included in the mirror, and these contours form a puzzle. [...] The universal figure of the mirror is divided and multiplied by breaking and cutting, to become an infinite number of unique figures. Each fragment of the mirror can be considered as a person who is part of a larger mirror—society. Society is like a big mirror.

Pascale Marthine Tayou is presenting a selection of sculptural works such as the Totems Cristal (Crystal Totems) and the Poupées Pascale (Pascale’s Dolls), dotting the gallery space with the installation Pascale’s eggs. Faithful to his use of disparate materials of diverse origins, the artist’s works embody the process of creolisation theorised by Édouard Glissant, a “mixture of arts and languages that produces the unexpected [...], a space where dispersion allows for connections, where cultural clashes, disharmonies, and disorders and interferences become creative forces”.

His work with crystal stems from an illusion the artist experienced during a trip to Venice: he thought he saw a Murano glass sculpture with African shapes, but when he got closer he discovered his eyes—or his mind—had deceived him. This is how he began to reflect on the qualities of the transparent material, allowing him to explore the spirituality of his creations in a new light and opening the way to new rituals.