There is always a disarming density in finding oneself in front of a work that does not stand upright but lies flat. It is an approach that rejects the verticality of images and the historically monumental posture of art in space. Spreading out an installation implies an always partial vision that asks instead to be approached, circumvented, even trodden on with caution. It does not dominate the space but reformulates it by repositioning the gaze. In its horizontality, the work dialogues with the architectural structure and what remains around it: it chooses the dimension of the ground. It places itself in the same dimension as the human body, almost suggesting a grazing movement, a slowing down.
Matt Mullican, “That Person’s Heaven”, installation view at Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, 2025, courtesy the artist and The Blank Contemporary Art, ph credits Roberto Marossi
That Person’s Heaven by Matt Mullican (Santa Monica, California, 1951) consists of a large floor installation designed for Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo and presented by The Blank during the 15th edition of the ArtDate Festival. The exhibition, curated by Stefano Raimondi, features a single large work: a carpet occupying the centre of the room, composed of thirty-two panels in white, black and red, together with signs and writing. In human tradition, the carpet is a place of concentration, but for Matt Mullican it also becomes a psychological and intimate map created in a trance or under hypnosis. During his sessions carried out with an altered consciousness, an alter ego manifests itself, “that person”, a figure who, in an almost schizophrenic manner, inhabits the artist’s mind and guides his actions.
Matt Mullican, “That Person’s Heaven”, installation view at Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, 2025, courtesy the artist and The Blank Contemporary Art, ph credits Roberto Marossi
For decades, the american artist has been constructing systems for classifying human experience: colour codes, symbols, diagrams, in an attempt to translate and decode the surrounding world into an understandable form. Yet something does not add up, because we come into contact with two conflicting practices; hypnosis breaks through control, undermining the reason and logic behind the map. In fact, Matt Mullican argues that the mind is often traversed by forces and impulses that escape mastery and self-control. The work appears to be divided into two sections. On one side, black and white panels representing everyday language; calendars, menus and daily notes as expressions of time and routines divided between the intimate and the public. On the other, circular cosmic icons coloured red reveal the personal, the invisible and the self, opening up questions about birth and death. Walking around the grandiose installation is like standing in front of two hemispheres: one made up of order and daily repetitions, the other representing the dimension of the Beyond as a cosmology dominated by angels and demons.
Matt Mullican, “That Person’s Heaven”, installation view at Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, 2025, courtesy the artist and The Blank Contemporary Art, ph credits Roberto Marossi
There is no noise, only the sound of footsteps. In this sense, the solemn silence of That Person’s Heaven dialogues perfectly with the theme of ArtDate, which explores it not as absence but as a metaphysical, private space of revelation. Silence is the space in which the artist abandons himself to ‘that person’, which corresponds to an open channel towards that which cannot be controlled. Hypnosis – the fracture between control and abandonment – drives his artistic practice and implies an awareness of a grey area where things lose their physicality and become sensation and pure chemistry. Mullican suggests not only that knowledge also arises from the loss of systems and structures, but also that life lies in the mind and in ideas rather than in objects.
Matt Mullican, “That Person’s Heaven”, installation view at Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, 2025, courtesy the artist and The Blank Contemporary Art, ph credits Roberto Marossi
In the setting of Palazzo della Ragione, the work takes on a ritualistic power, as if Matt Mullican had laid out a visual version of his own mind. While contemporary art sometimes risks drowning in the information overload it analyses – and which surrounds it – Mullican overturns this paradigm not by simplifying reality, but by magnifying its complexity. That Person’s Heaven is an encyclopaedic system that recounts an obsession with categorisation, an open manual of mental chaos.
Info:
Matt Mullican, That Person’s Heaven
Curated by Stefano Raimondi
14/11/2025 – 18/01/2026
Production The Blank Contemporary Art
Palazzo della Ragione
Piazza Vecchia, 8A, Bergamo
The Blank Contemporary Art – The Blank Contemporary Art
Irene Follador (Venice, 1997) is an emerging critic and curator. She graduated first in Art History at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, and then she obtained a master’s degree at NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. She has been collaborating with Juliet Art Magazine for a long time and, at the same time, she carries out her independent curatorial practice; her research and interest mainly tends towards works of moving images and new Media within the contemporary art system.
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