With Mother, Robert Wilson transforms the Pietà Rondanini into an extraordinary experience

Wilson sees light not merely as an instrument of stage design, but the very origin of space. “Light is what shapes space. Without light, space doesn’t exist,” he says. His work does not build, but reveals. It is an experience that dilates time and creates a space where the viewers can lose themselves in their own depths and then find themselves. Mother is not a stage design but a sensuous and inner experience. “In the year of Euroluce, hosting the Salone del Mobile with Robert Wilson is a dream come true,” says Maria Porro, president of the Salone del Mobile.Milano. “Mother is a work that defies convention. Just like the power of Michelangelo’s ‘unfinished’ work that paved the way for a new vision of sculpture,” he continues. The Rondanini Pietà is the sculpture on which Michelangelo worked for twelve years until his death in 1564. A subject that the Renaissance artist had already sculpted for the Vatican in the famous Pietà of 1499 and later in Florence between 1553 and 1555. What made it a milestone in the history of Western art is its deliberately unfinished quality, where the artist extracts the latent image already present in the marble, purifying it of any naturalistic formalism, in an attempt to convey the spiritual essence of sorrow and compassion.  

“When I first saw the Pietà Rondanini, I sat in front of it for more than an hour. Then I started walking around it. I felt a powerful energy, an almost mystical presence,” says Robert Wilson. In this way the playwright’s brilliant mind expresses, amplified, his experience of this universal work kept in Milan. One of the most innovative and influential visual artists and theatre directors of our time, he is renowned for combining theatre, dance, light, sound, architecture and the visual arts in mesmerising works.