PINO PASCALI AT FONDAZIONE PRADA

I wonder whether nature and the other elements represented in Pascali's original sculptures actually do have anything to do with nature.

What do those sculptures have to do, for instance, with what was going on in America? Is there really something special about them?

The subversive Pino Pascali succeeded in giving a shape to his visions and his talent through an artistic and powerful social analysis.

In a Rome that was poetic, real, and raw, he became one of the most important figures of the Arte povera movement, influencing and enriching many artists who gravitated toward it in that period, and paving the way for the ones to come.

Pino Pascali represents the poetics of the unexpected, of the sabotaged concept. He was the first Postmodern artist in the history of Italian art.

With a tendency toward scenic combinations, his works are linked to experimental theater, The Living Theatre, and Jerzy Grotowski in particular, as well as to Antonin Artaud's "theatre and its double." He knew how to arrange the world of nature and of humans based on cycles, measures, and modules, which were immediately recognizable, coexisting with, and not subjected to, the artistic experiences of his time.

After his average career as a student between Puglia, his native land, and Naples, the artist arrived in Rome to attend the Fine Arts Academy, where his professors, one of whom was Toti Scialoja, noticed his outstanding, strong attitude.

His mother herself had an artistic inclination, and was the cousin of Gio’ and Arnaldo Pomodoro.  Pascali began collaborating with the theater and with the Italian State TV company RAI, a trailblazer of Italian creativity and generational change.

In such a fervent scenario Pascali reinforced his identity, initiating the construction of an artistic trajectory of conscious subversion.

Pascali's work was innovative, especially in relation to his sculptural production, which over the past fifty years has had a fundamental impact on several generations of artists and critics and continues to draw the attention of the international public.

After a few group shows, in 1965 the Roman gallery La Tartaruga organized a solo exhibition, which made Pascali's work visible to the national and international gallerists and collectors. The critics began shining a light on him as well.

Pascali was capable of giving a shape and a weight to the elements that characterized his childhood and adolescence, valorizing them with contemporary exhibitions and an interpretation projected toward the future: concepts that he would carry forth in every material, visual, and dialectical conversation.

He managed to explore the relationship between sculpture and scenic elements, offsetting them with everyday objects.

He created works that from afar have a concept, which is overturned before a close-up view, works all made with basic, natural and recycled materials, or ones of new industrial invention.

The artist pondered the potential of a 'fake' or 'simulated' sculpture.

He titled his works as though they were solid, full bodies, getting around the first view with further examination of the concept, and then emptying out that very same concept.

While Pascali's complex approach to sculpture was indisputable, the factor that made his artistic practice so ingenious and original was another.

As the transposition of his necessary visions was not enough, Pascali became the performer and partner of his works with playful and brilliant interactions that had never been seen before. We can acknowledge his ingeniousness in the photographic series where every interaction is represented.

The natural elements he had encountered during his creative growth were developed in a more adult and mature concept.

He used soil and water together with new building materials. To his studio he brought new consumer products, synthetic fabrics with which he created animals, monsters, traps, and bridges.

He was attracted and devoted to the development of works made of plastic, symbolizing the country's contemporary ascent.

That same plastic became the vehicle that transported one from the rural to the real future.

Pascali was influenced by the catch-phrases in the magazines of his day, and at that point the past ironically clashed with the present, creating the rupture that was dear to the brilliant minds of the same period, like Alighiero Boetti and Leoncillo.

PASCALI is an interesting parallel between the consumeristic and industrial myths of Italy in the Sixties, with here and there a material rural reference.

“There are no plastic-free homes," are the words printed in capital letters. Even Pascali himself was undoubtedly attracted to it.

His nature represented by wooden structures draped with taut white canvas were an abstract nature that was geometric and unreal.

“Of course I love animals, but this does not mean that I want to make more animals: it is a subject, an image, a pre-established concept, words that are already impressed that always intrigue me, so I accept them and choose them as points of reference. What I do does not consist in a search for form. It is a way of verifying, starting from another point of view, what others have already done." The series titled "Gli Animali," where we find beaks, trunks, legs, and other body parts, waive the dimensions of the giant format. 

Suffice it to recall the Bachi da setola, 196X, made with nylon brushes. The symbol of consumerism and nature joined in a single animal. 

Pelo e Contropelo, Solitario, Cesto are huge installations covered with soft fur, that eternally leave open the question of what could possibly be left to invent after an artist such as this one.

We realize here that the artist produced a work that had nothing to do with nature.

The series "Le Botole," which represent the works in progress and the photographic reflection of an Italy that planned its growth around masses of concrete buildings. 

And then there's Eternit, a leading material in his works and installations. It appears constantly, suggesting an equally central role it played in all of society at the time. As soil was to nature, asbestos was to the new industry.

Pascali was the first to deliver his sea to a museum institution, offering a maxi-puddle during an exhibition. L'Attico, 1967, Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra.

The puddle was 32 meters in size and the artist said: “I chose the sea because I have been pursuing this image for some time now. I made it with water because it is the element that is the most representative to make this thing, also because water has rather well-known hallucinating features. Especially due to the color, which takes on a dimension of depth and space that is missing in paintings."

Pascali uses the language of marketing and advertising, and thus is born Bottiglia di Champagne, developing a comedy that mocks and celebrates the myths of nature and Italian consumerism.

He does not fail to reference his stance on war.

He creates missiles that in his childhood memories marked an entire generation between World War II and the building of a new Italy. His subversive thinking acknowledges that he has the strength to create a work and to destroy the concept. He thinks about the myth of war, building weapons made up of waste materials because he himself was a pacifist. In his "Armi" series (Toy) we can view this in all its splendor.

Each of Pascali's works is a new performance that switches on his thinking. Pascali was aware of the fact that the postwar artists had to dedicate an equal amount of energy to both exhibition activities and finishing their works in the studio.

Being an 'exhibitionist' meant “first of all creating with one's own works involving albeit temporary sites, ones that were more than the sum of their parts."

All the visions and the materials represent those memories that in the growth of the individual, instead of becoming weak and ever-farther memories are bigger, increasingly so as if exemplifying the law of retribution (contrappasso) and more contemporary, signifying the historical and social macro-moment that he himself represented.

A thought that, now more than ever, could be relevant on every front.

His works are a brazen and deep material introspection.

Pascali, at the height of his creative vigor, left us, like an ephemeral falling star. In just a few years' time he had built up an unparalleled intellectual and physical legacy. He died in a terrible accident while riding his Guzzi V7 on a September day in Rome.