The Pascali Museum is currently hosting the exhibition Pasolini Pascali Pazienza. Corsair Signs and Drawings curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio. The exhibition opened on the 12nd May 2021 (Until September, 12nd).
Ethics, Moral, Change, Multitude are only a few of the qualities that Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pino Pascali and Andrea Pazienza have in common. “Authors that left us prematurely but who, in the course of their short lives, have managed to pass down to us the revolutionary dream of change, the existential sense of a vital and corsair utopia”, the curator of this conceptually pirate exhibition explains.
The works of the three artists are reinterpreted and compared in a Corsaire Exhibition, through drawings seen as an intimate and vital part of art, which in these artists finds numerous expressions, starting, for example, from the interpretation through comic strips or by using dialectical expressions.
This exhibition will show the audience how they, in line with the best innovative tradition, were able to converge the vulgar with the cultured, the high with the low, and with it also the criticism towards the entertainment world.
On this topic, Valérie Da Costa writes in the catalogue: “While Pasolini, in his first poems supported the use of the Friulian dialect as an official language, in the 1950s and 1960s… in order to promote … the cultural peculiarities of the peninsula as opposed to the dominant uniformity, Pino Pascali loved to play with the dialect of the city of Bari, as a way to go back to his roots and his childhood spent in that city. One instance of this is what he writes in the catalogue of his last retrospective « Alé! Alé! Cita iei vogghie bbene a Cita la scimmie de Tarzan en ge vogghie acchià u sesteme mpe potelle ntrappola» (Ehi!Ehi! I love Cheetah, Tarzan’s chimpanzee and I want to find a way to capture her)”.
These are languages, corsair signs and drawings that act between criticism, desperation and hope.
They are mainly early drawings of the three authors: Pascali is seen essentially as an artist, Pasolini fundamentally as a poet and Pazienza as an author of comics strips. The latter two are presented in this exhibition in a more “artistic” light.
What makes these three authors special is their versatility. They do not consider art as something to be expressed in only one form but across many different platforms.
Their signs and drawings are also evidence of their extraordinary versatility which proves that art is everywhere: literature, writing, cinema, painting, comics, photography, graphic design, publishing, television. “Pasolini Pascali and Pazienza act in a state of primitive impulse, might it be painting, language, theatre, performance, photography or television, all their works aim at being original, in the meaning of tending towards their origin”, Antonio Frugis explains in the catalogue.
Pascali, Pasolini and Pazienza are corsair artists who break into the creative scene as innovators, forerunners and therefore avant-gardists. Their work, in fact, is not only an important resource for art, but for society as a whole.
On this topic, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio comments : “Being so dismayed by History and anecdotes, where the rising sun of History sinks towards everyday life, in which the
enlightened-modernist utopia ends up being adrift of the little narrations of signs and drawings that tell their own story, between an archaic lost world and a contemporary world of losers.”
Photographic and video footage as well as a catalogue complete the exhibition. The texts in the catalogue are written by the curator, by Valérie Da Costa, art historian, art critic, curator and teacher at Strasbourg University and by Antonio Frugis, Senior Curator at the Pino Pascali Foundation.
