Mario Pasqualotto Pasqualotto

Mario Pasqualotto's work is that of a multidisciplinary artist who invites reflection through the variety of materials and techniques he uses in his creations. His artistic activity covers different branches of the arts, from pictorial works, performances, jewelery to sculptures. The everyday objects and metals help the artist to create a deconstruction with aims to approach new meanings. In this work, we contemplate the harmony of metals with natural materials. A way of ordering and messing up, assembling and dismantling ephemeral resources to reverse the hierarchy of their discourse, with the austerity of materials. Materialize human concerns through the poetics of objects already known to all of us.

Fragility has always been one of the central themes in Pasqualotto's work. In his last works, the artist was inspired by If this is a man of Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz. In it he makes an intense reflection on the dignity of man and the meaning of life in the extermination camp. The dish, according to Levi, was one of the treasures on a daily basis in the countryside, since without it you lost everything. Pasqualotto retrieves these dishes to show the value that certain objects that we can not value in our daily life can reach. This work is part of the Republic series (1999-2000), where he recreated the pain and suffering of genocide.

As a result of working with copper plates and the chemical reaction with other chemical materials, Pasqualotto observed the greenish forms that this corrosion generated. In an unconscious way, he discovered Monet's water lilies in them. On this occasion, he deconstructs the structure created by the French painter to reconstruct a new approach. Dismantle the hierarchical approach of these water lilies to play with the shadows, their colors, their meanings ... until you reach the symbiosis of his work with that of Monet. Once again, the artist shows us again the use of different materials to build their own visual language.

Temps de memòria is a clear example of the artist's compositions. For this work, Pasqualotto plays with materials as diverse as glass, lead, piano string and neons. This composition can evoke the memories that we keep in our brain, diluting with the passage of time, creating those glass drops that disappear as our memory decreases. We can also think, in tears of our memory, how the most present memories are opening up to those older ones that have occupied a place in our memory. A very powerful visual language to represent the passage of time throughout our life, a construction of memories that we are piling up in our existence.

The chemical reaction with all kinds of materials has been a constant in the work of Mario Pasqualotto. If Monet painted his works to discover the different perception of the same object according to his light and he did it in quick sessions to take advantage of that light, Pasqualotto does the opposite. Slowness is one of its most symbolic characteristics. Coppers are the appearance of an appearance, they are not paint, they are pure sensations produced by the corrosion of metal, a chemical reaction that generates shapes that suggest pictorial effects. In Pont et Saule, Mario Pasqualotto plays with the corrosion of the chemical elements to generate what Monet created in his quick painting sessions. A game of lights and colors that create a unique atmosphere in his work.

Life, nature, death or the passage of time are some of the themes that guide Mario Pasqualotto in his research process, in which we find a weak balance between the hard and the sensitive, the critical and the poetic. We could debate what we call the magic of artistic creation, but it does not matter if we can not witness the material. The magnetic power of the artist's works evokes many things, like this work. Once again, Pasqualotto mixes all kinds of natural and chemical materials to get us to evoke a deep sea, a sea full of blues, full of dark magnetisms that we can not explain. In this case, the nature of the unknown is what causes this chemical reaction on the surface of the wood.

One of the most striking works is the decomposition into three planes of a painting of Monet's water lilies: copper plates colored by acid, evoking the peace that the French artist felt when painting them in his garden, which appears as a little paradise. Pasqualotto creates a feeling of water with the leaves of those water lilies and plays with the reflections of the lights that are created in it thanks to the methacrylate. This game, leads us to ask ourselves about the truth of art, about whether what we perceive is what the artist we perceive really wants. What Monet suggested to us with his brush, now Pasqualotto wants to show us the corrosion of the metal.