The 24th Pino Pascali Award 2022 has been granted to the artist Nico Vascellari (Vittorio Veneto, TV, 1976) guest of the Pino Pascali Foundation with the retrospective Tre, Quattro Galline (Three, Four Hens) curated by the Prize Commission, headed by Rosalba Branà, Roberto Lacarbonara and Pier Paolo Pancotto.
The exhibition, presents sculptures and collages that are, for the great part, being presented for the first time. The first piece, Out Of Step (2022) – located on the front wall at the entrance to the main room and created with arched canva technique, similarly to Pascali’s “fake sculptures” – is composed of three elements moulded in the shape of stylized sheep: a reference to the historical album by the same name by the American hardcore punk band Minor Threat. The artist employs the anarchic metaphor of a subject that “stands out from the pack”, thus retrieving an iconic element long “worn” like a secret tattoo.
Animality, central theme to the exhibition, recurs also in the main installation Tre, Quattro Galline (Three, Four Hens, 2022) located in the middle of the main room. A mysterious sculptural presence that, destined to be revealed only when accessing the room, involves and pushes away viewers, taking them by surprise, both visually and emotionally.
With this solid and essential artwork, Vascellari returns to ponder – in the light of Pascali and his articulated Ricostruzione della natura (Recreation of Nature, 1967-68) – on the technical and artifact relationship men have with the element of nature, which we place under forms of control, confinement, production and commercial organization. This is what the 88 collages of the series Unknown Eyes (2022) allude to. They were created with food packaging that presented animal illustrations of which, however, we can only catch sight of small eyes that peep through the dark background. Similarly, in the room that hosts Pascali’s artwork Cinque bachi da setola e un bozzolo (Five Bristle Worms and a Cocoon, 1968), Vascellari intervenes with two collages Lidl, 14.04.2021, Roma (2021) and Carrefour, 05.04.2021, Roma (2022): a clear reference to the commercial exploitation of the animal figure in order to achieve a rhetoric narration that intertwine consumerism, play, nature and childhood.
In the room of the Pino Pascali Atelier, among the artist’s finds and his graphic and photographic works, we find the piece Uruboro (2022), synthesis and development of the relationship between natural materials (wood) and artificial ones (gum) in which the structural analogies between the snake and the pneumatic define an endless short-circuit between life and goods.
The exhibition continues also in Exchiesetta, in the historical part of town, with the neon light artwork W.F.Y. (2022)