Stefano
Pasquini has a relationship of total detachment from the average outlook onto
reality. Such operation does not exclude his own critical awareness, it rather
strengthens it. This “detachment” in fact is due to a strong sense of irony
which ensures his distanced stand, so that he can qualitatively increase his
ability in facing, in a disillusioned and uninhibited way, the facts of the
present with the certitude that the possibility of a communication still exists.
In fact Pasquini’s incursions in various fields of reality become explorations
of social paradises which, as “monsters”, are consumed and tossed on the first
page. Thus sometimes simple photographs collected from the floor are enormously
enlarged and dominate from the walls of buildings. Or by following an opposite
operation, many elements, the ones which are “important for all” – and as an
example a banal little statue of the liberty can be used – are reduced to such
a point that they can be found only with a magnifying glass. It is anyhow a way
to always put precise problems forward: these are the actual truisms, the
obvious and self-evident truths that have the duty to move our attention from
one point to the other, and to anesthetize the existent. In order to achieve
it, Pasquini confidently resorts to the grotesque and to the paradox, just to
induce an “upsetting” of meaning. I was thus saying that his are vitriol
operations, that are corrosive of the phenomenological plane of reality. By
going “underneath” they oppose the obviousness of today’s world as well as the
immense and predictable net of information, since they act as displacing
elements through more effective visual inputs. In fact, the triggered course
equals Freudian witticisms which have the duty of letting many certainties
precipitate, and of provoking instead, as a short circuit, an arrest in a sort
of lightning of clearness. To reach it, Pasquini often “changes face” and
descends into increasingly different clothes to merrily escape, disguised as
Spiderman or as a banal observer with four eyes or as a mute and blind interviewer
as a “dumb servant” (Questionnaire, 2003). On the latter event, he
covers his head with a pumpkin (as a blockhead, deprived of autonomy and
intelligence). Instead of his mouth he has a closed zip which underlines the
awareness of the impossibility to communicate. Thanks to his goodness, though,
not to scare us too much, Stefano adds Mickey Mouse eyes. How does the
interview then take place? Certainly not as the same word would indicate, that
brings us back to an operation seen – as a matter of fact – between two or more
people, where there is and interviewer and those who are asked. The interview
is mute and thus, if we wish, not driven, but it is only made by questions
which paradoxically regard “low”, daily problems, (Which is your favorite
word?) or problems which regard “high” facts (What do you think
of the conflict in Iraq? What is
Originally published in “Work – Art in Progress” N° 8, January –
March 2004.