ANDY WARHOL/ Inside that “wild” American there was a religious man

"One could do a themed exhibition a month on Andy Warhol (1928-1987, ed), there is so much material. We've seen enough retrospectives; it's time for something new," says Gianni Mercurio about the American pop artist. Mercurio was the curator of the latest (and most successful) Italian exhibitions of Warhol, at the Milan Triennale (2005) and the Cloister of Bramante in Rome (2008). "Just one-fifth of the material that is in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has been cataloged, so there is a lot of work left to do," Mercurio adds. Warhol is one of the most versatile personalities of the twentieth century, the expert explains in this interview, and one cannot understand him without touching on his deep, but hidden religiosity.

Warhol invented serial works of art, but they seem to be the opposite of the singularity that it is a work of art as we normally think of it.
The rejection of uniqueness seems to be one of his most "diabolical" inventions, whether he was conscious of it or not, but with Warhol unconsciousness is a very remote possibility because there was little that was random about him. He appropriated the famous Walter Benjamin concept of reproducibility and brought it to its extreme. Benjamin was a Marxist and the cancellation of the uniqueness of a work of art was in favor of the popularity of the art, which was supposed to reach the lower classes. Warhol did the same thing but in the service, in some way, of capitalism. He stripped Benjamin’s multiplicity of its Marxist roots, and reclothed it in a capitalist way.

What is behind his choice to multiply things? What is Warhol’s relationship with the prototype?
Warhol experimented with reproducibility in his early work in both his portraits, and his famous icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley, and so on. But there is also a religious origin for his inspiration so that not even the reproducibility can be explained without this factor. Let us consider his Last Supper (1987, ed). When Alexandre Jolas asked him to work on the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, one could not help but think he was going to create just nth postmodern epic figuration. This is present but it is not the only inspiration, and not even the most important one.

What is your opinion of that work by Warhol?