The artist Michelangelo Pistoletto
is returning to the Baths of Caracalla in Rome with his
sculpture 'The Reintegrated Apple', to be exhibited through
September 23.
Pistoletto (b. 1933) is painter and art theorist who is
acknowledged as one of the main representatives of Italy's Arte
Povera modern art movement.
His work mainly deals with the unification of art and
everyday life, nature and artifice.
The Reintegrated Apple is made out of a two-meter-high
single block of white Carrara marble, and is shaped like an
apple that someone has taken a large bit out of, with the
bitten-off part subsequently "sewn" back on.
In Rome, it stands inside the guard post from which the
soldiers of Imperial Rome watched over the entrance of workers
and goods headed for the Baths of Caracalla.
"The Reintegrated Apple represents the entrance into a new
era, in which the artificial and the natural worlds come
together in a planetary equilibrium".
"The bite is the sign of sin - as though to say that going
against nature is already a sin," the artist went on.
"We must solve this knot, bring science and technology
closer once more, renew the natural world with the artificial
one and find a new harmony in the juxtapositions".
"I am only offering a vision," Pistoletto added.
Asked whether or not the staples holding his apple together
will withstand the test of time, he replied that "we must all
become dressmakers, otherwise the bite will remain - as well as
the regret of not having sewn up the wound".
Pistoletto has made another Reintegrated Apple for Milan,
but in a softer shape "resembling a heart", he said.
The artist is returning to Caracalla after exhibiting 'The
Third Paradise' there in 2012. That piece that remains in the
archaeological site.
The Third Paradise stems from a 2003 manifesto in which
Pistoletto first described its meaning and drew its symbol - a
new version of the mathematical infinity symbol with three
circles instead of two, representing the two opposites of nature
and artifice, with the middle circle as a conjunction of the two
representing the generative womb of a new humanity.
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