Executed in 2004, Jim Dine’s Prayer on the Mirror is an extraordinary iteration of his series inspired by Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1883, whose subject yields rich metaphoric potential in Dine’s work. Across impressively scaled wood panels, the triptych captures the fabled mischief-maker, famed for his transformation from a marionette to a ‘real boy.’ Beneath the roughly worked paint, however, the fairy tale falls away. “It’s about the alchemy,” Dine explains of his chosen subject. In Pinocchio’s harrowing journey from object to human, he recognizes the role of the artist: bringing material to life.
“It’s about the alchemy…This is the talking stick that became a boy, an innocent metaphor for art.”
—Jim Dine
Across his six-decade career, Dine has explored many motifs—the heart, the robe, the Venus de Milo—but his investigation of Pinocchio unearths a fresh, striking vulnerability. Similar to his New York contemporaries, ranging from Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol, Dine forages for subjects in the quotidian. In the late 1990s, he looked to boyhood for inspiration: Pinocchio, the iconic Disney character and Dine’s childhood hero. The original story of Pinocchio, however, intrigued Dine most of all, and it would come to define his artwork in the 2000s. With increasing eeriness, Dine has reproduced the character in dozens of sculptures, thousands of prints and a 176-page illustrated edition of Carlo Collodi’s original novel. Most monumental, however, are a few rare Pinocchio paintings, the grandest of which Phillips offers this July.
“The artwork ‘runs away,’ has a life of its own, disrespects its creator… and if misbehavior is a sign of life, Pinocchio has life in abundance.”
—Michael Thomas DavisPrayer on the Mirror depicts three versions of Pinocchio’s transformation, each standing six feet tall and rendered in emotional, unwieldy pigment. The left panel reflects his marionette form, wooden and sharply defined; behind him, sparse sweeps of color reveal the panel beneath. His expression, however, is obfuscated by blotches of black paint, smudged and peeling atop worn paper as if in a fading memory. Darkness carries through to the center panel, where Pinocchio’s body is overtaken by black paint. Reminiscent of a schoolboy’s chalkboard scrawl, a swirl of white writing surrounds him with mentions of prayer, suffering and the Holy Spirit. With his wishes realized, perhaps, the right panel envisages Pinocchio in his most human-like form: bright and irrepressibly joyous. Dine’s expressive swathes of color can barely contain the character; in vibrant, overlapping layers, the paint itself adopts the playful disobedience of the young boy.
