It was originally scheduled to end on June 30, but it has now been officially extended until September 1: this refers to the exhibition Metawork – Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Royal Palace of Caserta, which features over sixty works by the master displayed in the halls of the Grand Gallery of the Royal Palace. The great success with both critics and the public prompted the decision to extend the initiative dedicated to the founder of Cittadellarte for an additional two months.

The exhibition is named after the artwork Metawork – United Portraits, which was unveiled for the first time specifically for this occasion. It was created from photographic portraits of eight citizens of Cittadellarte and recombines them using an artificial intelligence program, allowing for a transition—characteristic of Pistoletto's work since the Mirror Paintings—from the individual dimension to the collective one.

The exhibition, produced by the Royal Palace of Caserta Museum and Opera Laboratori in collaboration with Cittadellarte and Galleria Continua, offers, as noted in a previous article, a deep exploration of the Biella-born artist's visionary concepts of metamorphosis and interconnection.

Let us take this opportunity, then, to (re)discover the contents of Metawork.

One of the key works in the exhibition is Love Difference - Mediterranean Sea, a large mirror table in the shape of the Mediterranean basin, surrounded by chairs each donated by one of the countries bordering this sea. The Mediterranean Sea unites different nations and cultures and becomes a mediator between lands, languages, political visions and religions, in the knowledge that they all hold a common cultural heritage and can be generators of a shared collective project.

Prominent among the themes addressed is the relationship between art and spirituality, with The Time of Judgment. The work, displayed in the west wing of the Royal Palace, is presented as a temple that brings together the major monotheistic religions-Christianity, Islam, Judaism-and Buddhism. Each religion is represented by a symbolic element placed in front of a mirror: a kneeler, a prayer mat, a Buddha statue. Also in the exhibition is Labyrinth, a work emblematic of Arte Povera, particularly in its use of cardboard, first presented in his solo show at the Boymanns Museum in Amsterdam in 1969.

Also on view at the Reggia di Caserta is the series Naked Mass of 2020, which features protagonists without clothes, different and unique. Without preconceptions, the human figure is taken in its aesthetic entirety and is used by the artist to demonstrate a cross-section of society. Each individual is shown as equal in the face of the beauty of diversity, whether ethnic, cultural or religious. The crossing of borders marked by the pictorial dimension represents for Pistoletto the opening to a landscape that faces the contemporaneity of existence. We then move on to Division Multiplication-Third Paradise, which is part of the series of works called Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, born of the realization that the mirror can reflect anything but itself. On the eight pairs of mirrors that make up the work is represented the Trinamic symbol.

Also as part of the mirror works are QR Code Possession - Self-Portrait and ConTatto: in the former, on a frontal image of the artist's body are imprinted as tattoos twelve QR codes - technology that Pistoletto will use starting in 2019 - that allow access to images and texts related to different moments of his artistic research; in the latter there is a quotation from one of the most famous works of Western art, namely The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo Buonarroti's 16th-century fresco repurposed in the form of a silkscreen print. In Pistoletto's work, however, it is no longer contact with the hand of God that generates the creation of Adam, but it is the device of the division and multiplication of the mirror that generates creation from the hand of man alone. Another work in the exhibition is Qr Code Possession - The Formula of Creation Meetings (2023), consisting of twenty colorful QR codes painted on as many large canvases, resembling a series of abstract paintings, which refer to video recordings of twenty meetings with which Pistoletto discussed his book The Formula of Creation together with figures from the worlds of art, politics, science and religion.