With my eyes...

10:00 a.m.

 


Maurizio Cattelan (Italy, 1960) is presenting a site-specific work for the Pavilion of the Holy See at this year's Venice Biennale. The painting of exaggerated dimensions occupies the entire façade of the church of the women's penitentiary, located in Giudecca. Not only the size, but also the image, cause a great emotional impact.

 

With my eyes, by Maurizio Cattelan (2024)
Holy See Pavilion, Casa di Reclusione, Venecia-Giudecca

 

In addition to the impact of the scale of these soles, the location of the pavilion is a total surprise: the Venice women's prison. And if we thought that Cattelan was going to exhibit his installation of Pope John Paul II, attacked by a meteorite, we were wrong. Instead he painted this large-scale mural in clear reference to Italian artist Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ, from 1483, which is part of the permanent collection of the Pinacoteca Brera in Milan. The Renaissance artist's canvas displays the image of Christ in an almost irreverent way for that time: an exaggerated foreshortening, where what we see in the foreground are the feet. All students, professionals and art readers, as soon as we saw Cattelan's work, we related those feet with the feet of Mantegna's painting: they are those of the dead Christ after being taken down from the cross. 

Cattelan's mural is out in the open, nothing prevents us from approaching it and feeling the roughness of this gray paint that has something sacred about it.

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Liliana Wrobel


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