Domino - 2002
Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea - Milano
Marco Meneguzzo
A visit to an artist's atelier was one of the most potent spiritual, emotional
experiences of the bourgeois era.
Surrounded by brushes, paints, canvases, objects,
the model, one could breathe the "true" air of freedom, of violation
of the rules that constituted the solid structural framework of the society
beyond the threshold.
Only a "free zone" such as an atelier - halfway,
in social terms, between a brothel and a smugglers' tavern - could allow one
to momentarily elude the bonds of convention.
And the place of creation, the lair of that strange animal that sacrifices social benefit for freedom and the
license of beauty, was also its portrait: a certain type of order, a photograph,
the books on the shelves, the style - usually untidy and eclectic - of the furnishings,
a carpet, a reproduction, an object were all traces of the complex personality
of the inhabitant of this place, offering the visitor the sensation of familiarity
with or near possession of the secret of that creativity, reconstructed by means
of the unconscious clues or habits revealed by the mixture of objects and the
atmosphere in the studio.
So why shouldn’t artists show their work by
starting precisely there, in the atelier? If there is any truth (and there is!)
in the notion that an artwork can be interpreted based on the place in which
it took form, and if the 20^ century was marked in art by a progressive awareness
and subsequent conceptualization of every artistic action, even the most violently
instinctive gestures - Pollock's dripping, Fontana's incisions, the nude model
coated in blue by Klein, the rites of Nitsch - the it is legitimate not only
to display one's physical and spiritual background, but also to construct it
for the benefit of the eyes of others, a conscious operation perfectly consistent
with the spirit of the times.
Nathalie Du Pasquier has done just that, constructing
a little studio - but we could also call it a set - that contains all the elements
required for comprehension of the expressive code with which she works.
It has the aura and dimension of a studio, the carefully selected objects of a set
(more like that of a television show than a set for theatre or film), found
by a prop-person who is also the director and actor.
It is like a set created for television because the objects are few, just enough to make the space appear
inhabited, but without the clutter of the real world that would overwhelm the
pixels of the small screen.
Thus the set for "Nathalie's room" has
a limited quantity of things, but each of them is significant, because nothing
is left to chance, everything is focused on the conscious reconstruction of
her intellectual and emotional environment.
On a shelf that runs along the entire
interior of this parallelepiped in unfinished wood (i.e. without feigned realism)
a plastic object, next to another, nearly covered in paint, faces a small painting
adjacent to a stack of books, while a small carpet simulates, almost ironically,
the reality of a "true" room. These objects manage to create web of
intersecting relations so forceful that it becomes a most visible, like the
web of infrared rays in the vault of some "impossible mission". Actually,
just as happened to Borges with words, the potential of infinity is contained
in a finite, relatively small number of signs.
It is not the multitude, the measureless hordes of objects in the real world that can narrate the infinite,
but the combinatory potential concealed in just a few: from a lottery ticket
to the bottles of Morandi - always the same, for forty years - to the selected
objects painted by Du Pasquier, objects to which she returns in different cycles,
from slightly different angles, in a light somewhat more glacial than that of
a few years ago, at times with a human presence (always headless, as in a Tom
& Jerry cartoon, where we never see the face of the lady of the house, because
the action is limited to another level of perception).
All this is potentially
the figure of infinity, the result of continuous, repeated ricochets from one
image to another, in spite of the small number of the objects depicted. It's
the domino effect. The game of dominoes, besides its presence in more than one
of Nathalie Du Pasquier's paintings, is a metaphor for a system of associations
that can be created inside a known code.
Whether we are using numbers or objects,
the many possible combinations can lead to success or to a blind alley: everything
depends on how the "game" is played. When applied to a single painting
or an entire cycle of works, this is also a metaphor for "knowing how to
see".
Thus each "player" chooses his own visual and ideal strategies,
attempting to prolong to the fullest that play of relations that intertwine
and unfold amongst the objects of Nathalie, laden just sufficiently with that
affection everyday habit bestows on humble things. How do you win this special
game of dominoes? Perhaps there is no real winner (although a contemplative
soul will certainly have a better chance than others), given the fact that just
as in the real game of dominoes, the material construction of the game - a black
line that stops, starts, lengthens without any rule of form, governed only by
numbers - is more attractive than its conclusion. But the transformation of
the observer into a player is already a minor triumph.