When Maurizio Cattelan was invited to participate in the Vatican pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale this year, he says, he was "the first to be surprised." At 63, the Italian still has a reputation as the great blasphemer of contemporary art, whose biting conceptual work has often caused a stir in the Catholic Church.
One of his best-known sculptural scenes of hyper-realistic effigies and stuffed animals features a wax statue of Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite. "Sacrilege!" shouted Cattelan's critics, who trashed La Nona Ora (1999) when it was shown in Poland, the pope's home country, in 2001.
Yet, says Cattelan, speaking to me via Zoom from his Milanese apartment, in front of an elaborate Art Nouveau wardrobe that frames what he calls, with characteristic self-mockery, "my terrible face" (with its signature aquiline nose), La Nona Ora is "absolutely not" anti-Catholic.
"At first glance," he admits, "it's not convincing as a warrior defending the faith." But, he tells me, "it is an image of strength. The Pope is still holding the cross and is not yet completely flattened. It's not that different from Jesus Christ on the cross. Both are a picture of torture."
Cattelan grew up in a Catholic working-class family in Padua and was an altar boy: "I grew up," he assures me gravely, "in the shadow of the bell tower of my church." Even the catalog for his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York looked like a Bible. When I ask if he considers himself a satirist, he mishears me and shakes his head: "I'm not a Satanist!"
Is that sunlight around his head - or a halo? Perhaps this inveterate mischief-maker - who once depicted a wealthy collector's supermodel wife as a naked, wall-mounted hunting trophy - really does have good intentions. If it were a painting, a screenshot from our interview of a smiling Cattelan, with wire-rimmed glasses and a flying gray quiff, could be called The Penitent.
Conversion is certainly the context for his contribution to the group exhibition at the Holy See Pavilion, which opens on Saturday. For Cattelan, the Vatican's decision to erect its pavilion in a functioning women's prison on the Venetian island of Giudecca is a "compassionate" and "revolutionary" gesture because "it shines a spotlight on people living on the margins of society" . Inspired by such a "charged location", he decided to display a huge mural on the facade of the prison chapel with a black and white photo of the soles of a man's feet, whom he calls father.
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"It could be my father, someone else's father, or the Father, the authoritarian figure of the Church," he explains; either way, "it is an image of powerlessness." Yes, Cattelan admits that he had "issues with authority" growing up, which still manifest - he laughs - in "the work I make"; Yet Vader is not, or not only, about giving in to an adolescent, Oedipal impulse to overthrow an all-powerful father figure.
"I actually see it as a deposition," he continues, referring to artistic representations of Christ's descent from the cross. Those soles will be noticeably dirty - reminiscent of the radical religious paintings of Caravaggio, who painted simple models with grimy feet. "At some point we will all have feet in a position like this," says Cattelan, who in Now (2004) once presented a wax figure of John F Kennedy, laid out in an open coffin, suited but barefoot.
Cattelan doesn't expect a backlash against Father, but acknowledges that his work is often beset by controversy - mostly "created by newspapers, by media that desperately need headlines," he suggests. "Chaos is not my priority. I like to highlight things in society that bother me, and probably bother other people, and I try to do that in a way that can be heard [to]." His target group is, he says, the 'audience': 'I don't know if this is a pop attitude,' he says, 'but I'm not interested in talking to the art world' - which in any case he suspects is his recent doesn't like work very much.
Even the decision to exhibit Him (2001), Cattelan's infamous sculpture of a kneeling boy with the adult face of Adolf Hitler, at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's birthplace (where the artist had a solo exhibition in 2019), was not the intention. be a provocation. Rather, He explains, He represents the "clash of evil and forgiveness"; in Blenheim "you could have read it in a way that Hitler was there to ask England for forgiveness."
Moreover, he laughs, in Oxfordshire: "Oh, my God, the joke was on me!" Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, Cattelan's satirical sculpture America (2016), a functioning solid gold toilet, reportedly worth £4.8 million, was stolen. "Everyone thought I was behind the theft," he says. Was he? "Are you kidding me?" Earlier this month, a 39-year-old man from Northamptonshire pleaded guilty to the crime.
However, did Cattelan not have a hand in the Guggenheim's decision to offer America to Donald Trump's White House instead of Vincent van Gogh's Landscape with Snow (1888), which the president had requested? "I didn't know anything at the time," says Cattelan. 'I wasn't asked. It was a matter between the curators of the museum."
What did he think of their bold suggestion? "It was certainly some kind of provocation," says Cattelan, "but it was a provocation that was not done on my behalf, and a bit naive. If I had to suggest something today [to lend to Trump, should he be re-elected]I would say Picasso's Dove or Guernica - because they are symbolic of the times we live in: one calls for a more relaxed approach to life; the other reminds us of a dangerous period ahead."
However, what about Comedian (2019), a banana taped to the wall that Cattelan offered for sale (in an edition of three, each priced at $120,000 (£91,000)) at an art fair in Miami: it certainly was intended to provoke? He shakes his head - although, he says, "it will always be funny," because "a banana is one of those comical fruit with a punchline," and "someone spent a ridiculous amount of money."
The truth is, says Cattelan, referring to today's appetite for contemporary art: "I don't think anyone is looking for shocking works." Instead, "the market is asking for something that is safe and easy to buy and sell" - a reflex, he believes, of a broader "moment of stark conformism" within society, caused by the "disorienting...dislocation" of the "digital revolution". ". "We live in very interesting times," he chuckles. "Everything is like, what the f-?"
How? "We are less free than in the 1970s," he answers - although he adds: "I have opportunities. I can do many things. I've never really been censored." At the same time, he notes: "Experiments are disappearing. Painting is now king." And, he predicts, "there will come a time when all this work will suddenly look dusty and pointless."
What about his own: Does this artist, routinely called a "prankster" or "jester," think his deadpan jokes will last? In fact, he explains, the humor in his work is a feint: "I like to glaze my work with a touch of humor, but it is a glaze. So when you remove it, there's a different flavor in there" - and it's not particularly tasty. "If you look very closely at all my works," he tells me, "there is a sense of loss, death and darkness."
Suicide, for example, is a recurring motif. Several tableaus involve hanging animals or figures, including simulacra of himself hanging from the neck; in Bidibidobidiboo (1996), which he describes as "a fairy tale gone wrong," a life-size stuffed squirrel sits slumped over a yellow Formica-topped table, a revolver at his feet.
"I'm not depressed at all," he assures me. "At school they considered me a clown. But sometimes I don't know...' He walks away. "Lately there has been a mask that I have been trying to remove. And this is a very tough job for me."
What's underneath? "We'll find out. I want to be the first to know. It's a process." But, he tells me, we are all "the best deceivers of ourselves: we are the ones who build our own prisons. The real enemy is within."
This pursuit of self-knowledge explains why, for the first time in "five years," he has agreed to a face-to-face interview, albeit through a screen; He usually prefers email because, he says, "I like to have control over the output." "Sometimes you have to test yourself, to check what's wrong with you, with myself," he tells me. "So whatever comes out of this, I'm going to regret it."
Not too much, I hope? "I already regret it enough!" He laughs before adopting the quiet, thoughtful tone of the confessional: "I'm not that bad of a person. I'm not a woke person and my first priority is creating problems for other people. I am an honest worker." Your sins are forgiven, Maurizio. Go in peace.
The Holy See Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opens on April 20. Information: labiennale.org
