Maurizio Cattelan is back on show with “Breath Ghosts Blind”

There are no golden toilets and dictators, no popes hit by a meteorite, and no fingers that send the finance that governs everything to that country. No, this is not the time for ready-to-use provocations, mockery, irreverent gestures. Breath Ghosts Blind, the exhibition that marks Maurizio Cattelan’s return to “his” Milan eleven years after his last work here (LOVE, exhibited in Piazza Affari), acts by subtraction edodging expectations, transforms the great architecture of the Pirelli HangarBicocca into a meditative environment shrouded in semi-darkness: an imposing, secular and post-modern cathedral in which to question the great themes of creation, life and death.

«It will be a silent exhibition», the artist had anticipated in the dialogue with Francesco Bonami published in the issue of Vanity Fair these days on newsstands, «where I let the viewer enter a space that becomes in some way psychological, and from which they will come out with great question marks». The solemn experience begins with Breath, the first of the three works on display. In the darkness of the old industrial plant, illuminated by a light falling from above, a man in a fetal position and a dog lie on the ground facing each other. The two figures seem to sleep, and in the stillness of the depicted scene they share a bond of absolute and primordial vitality: the function of breathing, the original mechanism of existence, hence the name of the sculpture. In the features of the man we recognize those of the artist herself, in a sort of candid self-portrait made of white Carrara marble, a material that gives the entire work an aura of timeless sacredness.

Ghosts, the second work, is the new version of an intervention already proposed on two occasions by Cattelan at the Venice Biennale. On the pillars and beams of the huge building, almost camouflaged along the iron wefts, hundreds and hundreds of taxidermy pigeons observe the visitors who move restlessly in search of a meaning, of a foothold, of something “concrete” on which pause your gaze: but where is the Cattelan exhibition? We are the exhibition, and in a reversal of perspective the real spectators are them, the pigeons: masters of the space, mute and omnipresent and unconsciously mocking witnesses who are up there as if they had always been there, and who will perch there even after, when our finitude will be accomplished.

The triptych ends with Blind, which announces its presence from afar, but which is revealed in all its monumentality only at the end, once you enter the walls of the Cube, the last area of ​​the Hangar. In the twentieth anniversary of the attack of 11 September 2001, Cattelan appropriates an image that has forever marked our contemporary imagination, that of the plane penetrating one of the Twin Towers in New York, objectifying it in a monolith of black resin which combines the two shapes plastically. By fixing the moment in the imposing matter, the work appears to us as a war memorial, a memorial dedicated to a collective tragedy and a pain and a sense of loss in which we all share. Those sentiments which, amplified by the pandemic, find an out-of-the-ordinary interpretation in these works by Maurizio Cattelan.