Campo di Marte

In the Solo/Molti feature, the column of Museum for Preventive Imagination, dedicated to exploring new approaches to the exhibition as a medium, MACRO presents the first major solo show byNathalie Du Pasquier in an Italian museum.

The French artist and designer, one of the founders of the Memphis group, has approached the show Campi di Marte as a Gesamtkunstwerk – a “silent symphony” as the artist says –comprised of a body of more than a hundred works produced from the 1980s to the present.

Nathalie Du Pasquier looks at reality as a catalogue “from which we can take everything and transform it into another world”. She has always been intrigued by the relationship between objects and the space in which they exist. Over the years, this process of investigation has taken form in paintings, sculptures, drawings, models, constructions, carpets, books and ceramics – always poised between representation and abstraction, twodimensional depiction and volume.

Her painting is expanded, poetically playing with complex harmonies of forms, granting life to inanimate objects without imposing any narrative, leaving the interpretation up to the viewer. A painting that exists as object, space or environment, in which any distinction between the work of art and its display structure has been erased.

For Nathalie Du Pasquier, in fact, the device of the exhibition is a dynamic tool that allows her to use her works as ‘raw material’ with which to build other, new creations. In this sense, the inclusion of works from past decades, juxtaposed with others from different periods, avoids the conventions of the retrospective, generating a single, large installation: a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art.

In contrast with the vast size of the exhibition space, the show is installed at human height. Nathalie Du Pasquier has worked on the walls as if they were immense canvases, painting them in different colours and shaping the room to transform it into a single setting, where the visitor/explorer can encounter paintings, drawings, prints and three-dimensional constructions. All these elements, combined in keeping with different logics, ‘play’ together like an ensemble, in a colourful musical battle that alters our perception of the space around them.