Reflect, become, play. In these three words, in the semantic casket of these three verbs, perhaps lies the core of the artistic research of Jeff Koons, the American artist to whom Palazzo Strozzi a Florence dedicates the great exhibition curated by Arturo Galansino and Joachim Pissarro, which opens today and will remain open until next January 30th. Shine is the title of the exhibition: a noun / verb that will evoke more than one idea to cinephiles. The glitter, it shining, it is in fact the ability to see beyond the surface that the child protagonist of Kubrick’s film shows to have: he sees psychic darkness in the labyrinths. In Koons’ production it is more than glittering reflectance: his works are often extraordinary abysmal games in which to get lost. Getting lost with the gaze and with the perception of oneself.
Seeing reflections makes one think, one might say. Where am I a spectator as I pass by Balloon Dog (1994-2000), a large mirror-polished stainless steel dog painted bright red? I am in front of the sculpture that winks at me remembering with its shape the animals made by clowns with balloons at children’s parties, but I am also inside the work that reflects me precisely because of its shine; and I am also in the becoming of the work because, by moving, in some way it is I who “transform” the work, which reflects me differently in every instant. It is the size performative of the works, their being the center of “performance” created by the viewer.
Art democratic, that of Koons, in the sense that there is an apparently immediate grasp of these works, which in reality lend themselves to many levels of reading. But also art dense, which bears the traces of many glances taken to the past (“When I saw The expulsion from the earthly paradise di Masaccio I decided to produce a body of work on sexuality that could help people remove that sense of guilt and shame, ”says Koons for example). Of course, there is the playful aspect, desecrating, found in many works, such as those recalling the ready-made by Duchamp. Koons takes a stainless steel fryer and exhibits it together with fluorescent lights (Nelson Automatic Cooker / Deep Fryer, 1979): a decontextualized object that will remain bright forever in contravention of the law of use for which it was born. Embellished and rendered useless, a sort of oxymoron of use. Or, with an inverse operation, it apparently takes symbols precious – be they a bust of Louis XIV or a Baccarat service – and he “lowers” them, translating them into the “proletarian” everyday life of stainless steel with which he reproduces them. In each case there is a short circuit of high and low, one demystification of art.
The series is on this same wavelength Gazing Ball, blown glass globes arranged next to or on top of reproductions of famous works of which they annihilate and renew at the same time the aura: the operation is more complex, because Koons takes up to the smallest details of color some canvases, studying the original palettes – for example The origin of the Milky Way by Tintoretto, or others by Rubens or Titian – or some ancient statues reproduced in a very white and almost abstract plaster, in a certain sense pop, and the pollutes with blue glass balls. That is, there is not only the dimension of the game, but also a sort of connection of times: the glass ball is “a bubble of human breath”, says Koons, and this breath seems to be transmitted to the works with which it dialogues, and to bring them back to the here and now, in an incessant ebb of one time into another.
The heart of the exhibition are the reflective, brilliantly reflective surfaces of many works. In this conjunction of the heaviness of steel and the lightness of shining, of reflection, there is a materiality that has both masculine and feminine. Indeed the size sexual art is at the center of Koons’ research, it constitutes a red thread, sometimes more concealed, for example in the form of desire induced by the smooth and shiny surfaces that have something “erotic”, sometimes more explicit: just think to Lobster (2007-2012), another shining red object, whose conformation contains both the masculine of the phallic form and the feminine of the Botticellian shell of the tail, and finally a playful allusion to the mustache of Dalì, another tutelary deity that winds behind the work of Koons. Or to the two Ballon Venus that enhance the male and female attributes in works that recall primitive art and its function as a symbol of fertility. Because everything is played out in the essential encounter that unites art and life and which finds its extreme synthesis in sex, of which Koons is the cantor.