“The mirror is a threshold where the finite and the infinite, past and present, art and life converge. The artwork is always the same, for the figure that remains captured in the frame, and always different, for the flow of images it captures in a succession of fleeting moments.”
Laura Cherubini, excerpt from the catalogue Arte All’Arte I, 1996
On the balcony of the cloister of Palazzo Minucci-Solaini, in the Pinacoteca of Volterra, the work by Michelangelo Pistoletto was installed for the first edition of Arte all’Arte, curated by Laura Cherubini.
“It is a sequence of five tree trunks. The first trunk is split in half and has a mirrored surface on the inner face; the second is cut at a 90° angle and lined with two mirrors, which become four through the phenomenon of refraction. Even where we cannot see—inside the material—this reflection moves from one to infinity. Just as the mind exists within the body, so too within the tree, inside the body of nature, there is the dynamic of reflection. The more the angle of the cut narrows, the more the mirror multiplies, until finally the trunk closes again, the two mirrors align and coincide, and the dimension of reflection is denied and hidden from us.
The two mirrors reflecting each other create, once again, an interior cylinder that corresponds to the outer form: on the outside, we have the virtual reflection of the inside. While we perform an apparently final gesture—closing the angle—the reflection tends toward infinity, and we can foresee it, as we have already experienced the multiplication. In the end, we reassemble the trunk, a fragment of a living organism, but by then we know that its interior is a reflective surface."
Laura Cherubini, Arte all'Arte I, 1996
