Provoke, displace, often irritate. The Paduan artist knows how to manipulate matter and the public without being ashamed when it comes to collecting
In modern life, which made the chatter of bar to the rank of global communication rise, not being talked about has become a very worst disaster than its opposite. We must make news, under penalty of irrelevance. Cattelan like Silvio Berlusconi. If you can speak well or bad, each with motivations that can also be the most justifiable, but it cannot be denying that you are still in front of a phenomenon of out of the ordinary, of those who pretend that they are not, there is a risk of understanding little about the world with which you have to do. You may not exist, but Cattelan yes. And if it exists, it is because it is practical, even with a certain shrewdness, that art of being talked about for which there is no need to have something to say at all.
In 2011 Cattelan, already rich and revered, had declared to definitively abandon the stage of art, convinced that he had exhausted any speech that he was able to exhibit through it. Nobody to believe it. Not that that exhaustion seemed unlikely, far from it, but alone he did not seem capable of being able to keep him out of the scene. It does not count what is said, it matters that it is said, this had been the leitmotiv par excellence of his proposal in art. He must have remembered it too, if it is true that that retreat has lasted a few months, after which he has dedicated himself to one of the most apt experiences of his career, the graphics applicable to infinity, between Elio Fiorucci, pop and dadaism of the 2000s, of the toiletpaper project (toilet paper). One of his countless finds, the retreat, which served to keep his feet firmly in the almighty flow of global gossip. There is no discussion: this is art in all respects, the art of our times. He makes Gigione, Cattelan, feeling a new Duchamp, but recalls the Roberto Benigni more than once. He still enjoys Épater Les Bourgeois, as the Maudits said, to sticken by others making them the object of its easy provocations with the flavor of the déjà vu, and these, instead of closing it, take it seriously. The more gigione, the more he recognizes the genius, the more his market quotations climb. He also jokes on this aspect, as an exponent of a Financial Art that recognizes to the economy of being the most concrete value among those involved in its mechanism. One of the most well -known companies in Cattelan was America (2016), a golden toilet – still a bathroom, must be a fixation – from the weight of about 100 kilos which, behind the evanescent anti -American and anti -capitalist satire, actually ascertained more consistent questions on the economic condition of the works of art (if a quintal of gold is worth so much, as can add the fact that it is used in a work of art? The work that is used to lose value in its specific market?).
Some of the questions answered the thieves directly, who with a more brilliant performance than his freed of art to focus on gold, refusal in order to be used differently. But that toilet had an insurance coverage of almost five million pounds and cattelan, given the conceptual character of the work, it always remains free to replicate it no less than Duchamp did with her fountain/Orinatio, the ideal mother of America. In the end, what remains afloat is the money, thanks to those contradictions of capitalism, and the system of contemporary art understood in it, which would be liked to be cleared. Contradictions within which Cattelan wallows like a king Mida, selling a banana attached to a wall with adhesive tape (Comedian, 2019) to a disproportionate figure if he finds an ultra -mirror that wants to pay so much only to show that he can. He is right to laugh about it, if there is a fool in this story it is certainly not him, as long as there are others there can always be hope. Fassi with a swollen wallet, of course, because it is first of all at their service that contemporary art must place themselves, the others at most can scandalize or applaud.
At Padovano Maurizio Cattelan, for at least twenty years at least the best known contemporary Italian artist in the world, the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bergamo dedicates an exhibition entitled Seasons, spread in five places in the city, with works partly located specific, as they say today (until next October 26). Bones proposes a realistic marble eagle, to evoke not only a Bergamo work by Giannino Castiglioni who pulled Mussolini, but all the powers that have resorted to this symbol, flanked to the ground. In empire the word in question is reported on brick, closed inside a glass bottle: this is also a good symbolism for all uses, as happens with certain gadgets for witty gifts. No it is the resumption of a battle horse by Cattelan, Him (2001), the silicone hitler that originally kneel in the Warsaw ghetto. Here the head of the infame is covered by an envelope coming into practice censored as well as at the time wondered in China. It is clear that in these conditions, as would happen if the head of the Venus of Milo was borrowed, the work loses in original meanings to be able to acquire others. But this is what had also happened with the first specimen, sold in 2016, far from the Warsaw ghetto, almost eighteen million dollars.
In November, a presumable “Barbùn” still in marble leaves a puddles of urine while sleeping on a bench: switched on the artistically sacred, but also his humanization. The nicest operation of Seasons is One, with the child with vaguely “cattel” features, similar to those of the three hanged three that the artist had a public tree hang in Milan causing the usual shock in the most foolish, who plays on the war, sitting on the shoulders of the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi in bronze in the roundabout in Piazza dei Mille. A way to revive a civil monumentalistic that unwittingly dialogue with contemporaries, remembering that Bergamo offered volunteers to the expedition of 1860 more than any other city, but also to pay homage to the little ones. By his own admission, Cattelan is a child who has never grown up: if we just can’t make new ones, at least we keep inside what we have been, he will be our precious life companion.
Shake the old man for new, as the golden rule of the market of these days wants, here is Cattelan’s greatest ability that continually recycles like a used dress. After all, why should contemporary art pursue the new? Old stuff.
