Giorgio De Chirico discovered that the most honest self-portrait is the one you cannot see.

In his metaphysical squares from the early twentieth century, the self dissolves into architecture, becomes shadow, statue, mannequin. This isn’t narcissism—it’s the opposite: a staging of one’s own insignificance before the mystery of existence.

With The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910), metaphysical painting is born: an art that abandons the visible to interrogate the invisible, the unconscious, the mystery. It’s a silent revolution. While his contemporaries—from the Fauves to the Cubists—chase dynamism, color, form, De Chirico freezes time. 

He paints deserted squares, mute statues, faceless mannequins: non-places that resemble dreams, or perhaps memories. De Chirico anticipates Surrealism and, even before Freud, opens a window onto the anxiety of the modern self.

A century later, Maurizio Cattelan perfects this strategy.

His self-portraits hide in plain sight, each a disappearance by intent.

He shrinks himself, hides, transforms into a puppet. 

In the famous Mini-Me (1999) watching from a bookshelf with a dejected air, or when he emerges from the gallery floor (Untitled, 2001, later sold for $7,92 million at Sotheby’s auction in 2010), or in Daddy Daddy (2008) where he appears as a Pinocchio drowning because he can’t swim. Cattelan doesn’t just represent himself—he represents the sensation of being himself, with everything he feels.

And this sensation, most of the time, is uncomfortable.

But Cattelan’s true metaphysical self-portraits hide in apparently different works. Take the donkey in “Warning! Enter at Your Own Risk. Do Not Touch, Do Not Feed, No Smoking, No Photographs, No Dogs, Thank You” (1994): a real ass eating in an exhibition, completely out of place, later removed at night because it disturbs the neighbors with its braying.

That donkey recalls the Cattelan who always feels inadequate, always too much, always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or the tiny ant making an umbrella gesture to anyone who approaches to look at it, presented in an enormous hall at the Gwangju Biennale (Untitled, 1995), in response to the organizers belatedly informing Cattelan that his work meant to be exhibited would remain in Italy because it was too heavy and expensive to ship, while he had already arrived there, on the other side of the world, for the opening.

That ant is also a self-portrait: the artist who feels small, insignificant, crushed by the system and pressures of the art world, which he’s always tried to dodge with medical certificates or last-minute escapes with bedsheets!

This is where De Chirico‘s intuition proves prophetic.

Modern art no longer needs to say “I am“, but “I feel“. This is psychic realism.

And often we feel small, inadequate.

Cattelan transforms this inadequacy into art: his self-portraits are always self-portraits of embarrassment, of being too much, of not knowing where to put your hands.

The difference is that De Chirico sublimated anxiety into metaphysics, while Cattelan transforms it into irony. But the operation is the same: making the invisible visible, giving form to the formless, transforming one’s own fragility into artistic exhibition and allowing others to see inside.

In the end, De Chirico’s mannequins might also seem like the first selfies of modern art.

Self-portraits of an era that discovered it no longer recognized itself.