Maurizio Cattelan The Last Judgement

The titles of every of his exhibitions sound like dying knells and resound like admonitions. So, after Not Afraid of Love, the deeply shifting retrospective at the Monnaie de Paris in 2016, Amen in Warsaw in 2012 and Breath Ghosts Blind, his XXL exhibition on the Hangar Bicocca in Milan (see Acumen n°14), for his first solo exhibition in China, the Italian star of up to date artwork levels The Last Judgment. A well-ordered chaos, elaborated in homage to the large fresco of the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel, with the allure of Apocalypse or funeral march…

Gathered in a type of macabre dance in open area, the sculptures and installations introduced as so many memento mori, exist to show the gravity of the work, too typically decreased to its iconoclasm and its irreverence. Beyond the provocations, subsequently, but in addition past the falsely narcissistic staging of the star artist, it's a meditation on dying, loneliness and wandering that is proposed to us. To the fall of the agglutinated bodies of the damned sucked by the chasms of Michelangelo’s Inferno answers the decay and the withering of the ghostly and solitary bodies or the corpses and the deserted crevices of Cattelan.

Shrunken our bodies (such as the miniaturized clones of the artist showing surreptitiously here and there, sitting on the fringe of the void or emerging from a gaping hole…); etiolated bodies (akin to his two falsely moribund doubles mendacity aspect by aspect on a coffin-like mattress…); bodies curled up on the ground and petrified in white marble; our bodies shot (as within the case of the suicidal squirrel littering the Formica table of his doll’s kitchen or the surprising stays of the horse pierced with a sign bearing the Christian acronym INRI); bodies suspended like hangers or embedded in the walls; our bodies buried with the appearance of recumbents (akin to Zhang San, the homeless man beneath his dingy blanket pecked by pigeons…); bodies decreased to absence (a name written in neon, previous boots where crops have grown…), to stigmata (monumental stained ft) or to gestures of supplication (arms in prayer emerging from quicksand).

Typically facetious and irreverent, the dramaturgy of the body is, with Maurizio Cattelan, deeply macabre and, despite appearances, typically mystical. A sign of the occasions? The Last Judgment testifies to this with a troubling acuity: never earlier than has his grave, excavated from the ground (for the first time in 1997), been so deep and its adjoining mound of earth so outstanding… As for the joyful acrobatics of his skeletons, which were not taken critically up to now (in the century earlier than), they've taken on a totally new tragic dimension.

Exhibition «Maurizio Cattelan”: The Last Judgment

UCCA – Middle for Modern Artwork – Chaoyang District, Beijing – Until February 20, 2022

And «Breath Ghosts Blind”  – Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan – Until February 20, 2022

Stéphanie Dulou