His most daring and iconic works are on display, free from moral hierarchies
Three exhibitions, curated by Denis Curti with catalogs by Marsilio Arte, form a single grand narrative of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) - the artist who, through photography, redrew the boundaries between pornography and art. These exhibitions in Venice, Milan, and Rome offer a deep dive into his themes of classicism, desire, and beauty.
At the age of 43, Mapplethorpe died of AIDS, a disease that was then underestimated and did not spare even the most brilliant artists. Two years earlier, Sam Wagstaff - his mentor, lover, and patron since 1972 - had met the same fate. In 1988, at the height of his success, Mapplethorpe established a foundation bearing his name, which continues to fulfill its mission of funding AIDS research today.
A New Yorker from a middle-class Catholic family of Irish descent, Robert was the third of six children. Before turning to photography, he studied painting and sculpture, with classical sculpture becoming his great love. The domestic environment was not for him; he preferred the freedom of discovering what respectability sought to hide. His theft of a pornographic magazine at age 15 is no longer just an anecdote - it highlights an even stronger attraction fueled by the fact that the packaging prevented him from flipping through it.
Who, at 15, is not tempted by the forbidden? For him, to use the words of James Hillman, it was something more: a sort of premonition of his daimon to overturn the clichés of the off-limits. Yet it would not be easy, even in the uninhibited New York of the 1970s and 80s. Working in black and white, Mapplethorpe managed to achieve an unprecedented aesthetic feat rooted in classicism: he subordinated provocation to formal perfection and an ironclad visual discipline, dissolving the boundaries between reality and theatrical fiction. He used space and light as if they were tools to sculpt images, bringing his themes of gender and ethnicity before the lens, and influencing both the world of advertising and self-culture (much like his friend Andy Warhol).
He reached beyond antiquity into the contemporary through his unique juxtaposition of bodies and lines, and the contrasting luminous densities of his subjects. This is equally evident in his floral abstractions, zoomed in like refined hymns to sensory desire and purity. The perfect image becomes a sublime obsession, an extreme internal tension, and a perception of an original lack: desiderium, the “boundary of flesh and dream,” much like the rose Federico García Lorca wrote of, which, “motionless in the sky, sought something else.”
In the second stage of this trilogy at the Palazzo Reale in Milan (running until May 17th), his most daring and iconic works are on display, free from moral hierarchies. It is a journey of freedom between sensuality and absolute formal rigor - between the imagination and the restless aspiration of eros toward the inaccessible.
