Nathalie Du Pasquier

The Nivola Museum is proud to present Volare Guardare Costruire, a site-specific project by Nathalie Du Pasquier, a French artist and designer based in Milan. Designed specifically for the museum space, the exhibition is configured as a retrospective dedicated to the artist's pictorial production from her beginnings to the present day.

At the same time, it is an environmental installation that blends painting, architecture and design. The exhibition path is articulated through a series of structures designed by the artist that transform the museum environment into a space to cross, explore, inhabit. The exhibition thus triggers a dialogue between the artist's ephemeral architectures and the historical structure of the building - the former Orani washhouse, today the beating heart of the Nivola Museum.

Inside these "rooms" and on the walls of the museum there are works made from the eighties to the present day, which tell the evolution of Du Pasquier's visual language: a lexicon made of figuration and abstraction, in which human figures and the narrative dimension gradually give way to the theme of still life, made of simple and everyday objects, which delicately evoke the human presence, and then again to geometric shapes and abstract constructions. The whole thing is bathed in a sundial light that gives the paintings a metaphysical air, as if we were in front of modern versions of Morandi's canvases or, in other ways, of the purist ones of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant.

The title, Fly Watch Build, refers to three phases of Du Pasquier's pictorial production.

Flying evokes the moment of detachment from the design of design objects, towards the freer practice of painting. And it is perhaps no coincidence that many of the works of this phase present scenes seen from above, with a bird's eye view perspective, symbol of the power of imagination, of its ability to hover high and expand freely.

Looking refers to a second phase, to the need to abandon purely imaginative scenes to dedicate oneself to a quiet and punctual observation of reality, even of the most daily and apparently insignificant objects, which instead reveal, to an interested look, extraordinary forms, precious details and the ability to understand in themselves the complexity of existence. They are visions that the artist defines as "very silent and very firm", which invite us to rediscover the pleasure of the sensitive world through a silent and careful observation.

Dissatisfied, sometimes, with the sensitive appearance of reality, Du Pasquier finally dedicates herself to Building, creating original structures, small three-dimensional abstract constructions that are then portrayed with a brush, reported on the two-dimensional plane of her canvases. This triggers a complex dynamic between reality and representation, in a wonderful metaphor for painting.

With this exhibition, the Nivola Museum confirms its commitment to enhancing the dialogue between art, design and architecture, offering an immersion in the visionary world of an artist who continues to reinvent the rules of seeing and building.

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