Michelangelo Pistoletto


The mirror offers its surface to physical life as a witness to its unlimited extent in space and time. When the mirror is shattered, its reflective power is not lost, it is multiplied as many times as there are fragments. As in fractals, every mirror shard, regardless of its size, preserves the properties of the large mirror, which reflects the totality of that which exists. During the performance, the breaking of each framed mirror is like a small galactic explosion that multiplies the particles of reflection and remains in the exhibition as the memory of a precise instant of the past, ceaselessly reflected in a new present. Every broken-mirror painting is therefore a document of an event marking a precise moment in the flow of time. The black coating that appears behind the shattered mirror suggests the dark void that contains the lights of the firmament. It appears also, however, as a black hole that swallows those lights in order to expel them again in a new explosion. Two mirrors remain intact to represent, through their reciprocal reflection, the unending regeneration of light and life.