In 1964, he showed a group of seven new works made of plexiglass with photographs attached at the Galleria Sperone. The Wall [Il muro], for example, was a simple sheet of plexiglass that was propped against the wall. Double Ladder Leaning against the Wall [Scala doppia appoggiata al muro] was composed of two plexiglass sheets onto which photographs of the two halves of a stepladder had been transferred. Small Table with Record and Newspaper [Tavolino con disco e giornale] was a plexiglass parallelepiped onto which photos of a coffee table, a record and a newspaper were applied. The last two works had the same subject as two Mirror Paintings from the same period. This was a first step in the exploration, in real space, of the new phenomenological dimension created by the Mirror Paintings. In the text Pistoletto published in the catalogue, he also took a stand on the practice of using ordinary objects in art that had emerged in those years and made a first declaration on the ‘conceptual’ nature of art.

“I find myself inside the picture, beyond the wall that is perforated (though not, of course, in a material sense) by the mirror. On the contrary, since I cannot enter it physically, if I am to inquire into the structure of art I must make the picture move outward into reality, creating the ‘fiction’ of being myself beyond the mirror. [...] At the present time it is easy to play on the identity between reality-object and art-object. A ‘thing’ is not art; but the idea expressed by that same ‘thing’ may be.”
(M. Pistoletto, I Plexiglass, Galleria Sperone, Turin 1964)