Preventive Peace is an exhibition/installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto – curated by Fortunato D'Amico – specially designed for the Sala delle Cariatidi in Royal Palace, in Piazza Duomo, in Milan.
The exhibition, promoted and produced by the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Milan, by Palazzo Reale, by Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, in collaboration with Skira, is curated by the architect and art expert, Fortunato D'Amico, and is fits into the framework of the Milan Art Week (11-16 April 2023), the widespread event coordinated by the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Milan, in collaboration with miart, which puts the main public institutions and private foundations of the city online deal with modern and contemporary art, with a dedicated program of exhibitions and activities.
The staging de Preventive Peace
Michelangelo Pistoletto's Labyrinth is the path of Preventive Peace, the trace of an itinerary of awareness extended within the large installation set up in the Sala delle Cariatidi. “The installation – explain the organizers – is the result of the progressive unrolling of corrugated cardboard arranged over the entire surface of the exhibition space which opens up to accommodate some of the most emblematic works created by Michelangelo Pistoletto during his activity and it is also a trace of the itinerary of awareness that has gradually allowed the artist to conceive "art at the center of a responsible transformation of society" an expression that constitutes the mission of his foundation, cittadellarte, active as a school in Biella since the 90s”.
A change that is possible, according to Pistoletto, only through a real practice of democracy that involves citizens and their organizations in the processes of responsible social transformation.
The Labyrinth signals the presence of the opposing duality between the monster and virtue. For those who delve into his plots, as did the hero Theseus, it is necessary to advance by avoiding missteps that could jeopardize his life and that of others. The risk is to be engulfed by the only inhabitant who dwells in the labyrinth, the Minotaur, universal symbol of all bullying, clashes and conflicts.
“Today humanity has fallen into an immense labyrinth built on a global scale, defeating the ancestral emblem of evil with a warmongering instinct is certainly not an easy thing; the outcome is not a foregone conclusion and success is not guaranteed. You enter and exit the labyrinth only by taking care to draw up a meticulous project of ideas, planning every detail to achieve the pre-established intentions.
It is only through the practice of Preventive Peace that we will be able to annihilate the monster and definitively abandon the labyrinth of conflicts” – declared the curator of the exhibition Fortunato D'Amico.
The visitor to the exhibition Preventive Peace he will necessarily have to make a sinuous and disorienting path walking inside the Labyrinth. In this "laborious contraption of art" at every crossroads he will necessarily have to choose the route to take to reach the other works on display, pause in front of them and reflect on their existence. Upon leaving the installation, he will bring with him the memory of an experience rich in imaginative contents and practical information, but also the awareness of having completed a tangible exercise, effective for reflecting on ways to get out of the labyrinth of everyday reality and establish Preventive Peace.
Seventy years ago, in 1953, right in the Hall of the Caryatids still burdened by the signs of the war caused by the Second World War, Pablo Picasso exhibited the large canvas Guernica; in the context of the pictorial story, the head of the Minotaur, the monster that dominates the scene of the labyrinth, can be glimpsed. In 1961 the Spanish artist designed the Dove of Peace, the same one that the student Manish Paul, of the Vinci Secondary School, winner of the "Educating to Peace: Leonardo, Picasso, Pistoletto" prize in the 2014-2015 school year, will use, replacing the olive branch in the beak with the Trinamic sign-symbol of the Third Paradise. Michelangelo Pistoletto takes on the design of Manish Paul, to create the image-logo de Preventive Peace.
Pistoletto, as early as 1969, designed his first Labyrinth at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Inside the installation, three members of Lo Zoo, a multidisciplinary artistic group founded by Michelangelo Pistoletto himself the previous year, perform performative actions by playing long megaphones used as if they were trumpets. In the following years the Labyrinth will be presented again on the occasion of other exhibitions, each time adapted to the environment that hosts it.
The labyrinths in our information age take on aspects conforming to the soft realities of digital electronic engineering, they process and manage the information of the entire network of interconnected nodes that support the communication channels.
Their presence manifests itself through different, invisible forms, which often escape even the observation of the most attentive critics, perhaps for this reason their impact on the planet has taken on gigantic dimensions. Humanity now has a formidable device at its disposal to counter the monster and establish Preventive Peace: The Formula of Creation by Michelangelo Pistoletto. It presents itself as a sign, a symbol, a mathematical expression capable of synthesizing the individual and collective research conducted by the artist and his organization, Cittadellarte, together with the Ambassadors of the Third Paradise. It is an instrument that transposed into numbers reveals that 1+1= 3, which can be exchanged with Me+You=We.
You and I, indeed all of Us, are responsible for the society we create.
The Reintegrated Apple, by Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the works on display, is also one of the great symbols of Milan (in its final location in Piazza Duca D'Aosta), dedicated to the balance between nature and technology, to sustainable change that can only be achieved through a responsible transformation, with art that promotes the interaction of different sectors of society, from education to nutrition, from architecture to fashion, from spirituality to politics.
The works of Preventive Peace in Milanese museums
The exhibition Preventive Peace extends with three installations by Michelangelo Pistoletto in the scientific museums of the Municipality of Milan, the Natural History Museum, the Planetarium and the Civic Aquarium, which will host a series of in-depth meetings during the opening months of the exhibition itself.
Peace thus becomes the common thread of a cultural plan carried out within the social labyrinth, which helps to avoid uncertainties at the crossroads of decisions and take the path of harmony instead of the one that leads to the path of contrast and conflict.
The artist, Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. In 1962 he made the Mirror paintings, with which he soon achieved international recognition. He is considered one of the forerunners and protagonists of Arte Povera with his followers Items less (1965-1966) and the Venus of rags (1967). Starting in 1967, outside the traditional exhibition spaces, he created actions that constitute the first manifestations of that "creative collaboration" that he would develop over the following decades, bringing together artists from different disciplines and ever wider sectors of society. In the 2003s he founded Cittadellarte in Biella, placing art in relation to the various areas of the social fabric in order to inspire and produce a responsible transformation of society. He has received countless international awards, including the 2007 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale and the 2013 Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts “for his consistently creative career as an artist, educator and enabler, whose tireless intelligence has given origin of prescient art forms that contribute to a new understanding of the world”. In XNUMX the Louvre Museum in Paris hosts his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, Anée un – le paradis sur terre. In the same year he received in Tokyo the praemium imperiale for painting. In 2022 his latest book comes out The Formula of Creation published by Cittadellarte Editions. His works are present in major contemporary art museums.
The exhibition
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Preventive Peace
Milan, Royal Palace, Piazza Duomo 12
Hall of the Caryatids
Open to the public from 23 March to 4 June 2023
Opening hours
Royal Palace
from Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 – 19.30
Thursday 10.00 – 22.30
last admission one hour before the exhibition closes
Tickets
full € 8
reduced € 6 children from 6 to 26 years and over 65 years
free up to 5 years
Michelangelo Pistoletto and collective projects in Ticino. We talked about it here:
