BRIC
September 24, 2019–June 19, 2020
On September 24, 2019 Mutina for Art opens BRIC, a site-specific exhibition by Nathalie Du Pasquier curated by Sarah Cosulich, created by the artist for the MUT space.
Inside Angelo Mangiarotti’s building, Nathalie Du Pasquier has imagined a large installation composed of seven sculptural parts. Seven structures of different shapes and sizes that give rise to an unexpected landscape, between sculpture and architecture, giant pawns and small towers.
The starting point is the brick, a fundamental architectural module since the dawn of human history, and a recurring motif of the artist for some time, also in her paintings. For her solo exhibition at MUT, Du Pasquier explores the brick in its physical and conceptual essence, as an element linked to the earth and the tradition of ceramics.
The exhibition BRIC comes from the idea of the brick as an archetypal compositional element: minimal, economical, repeated, rhythmical, adaptable to the widest range of forms, the brick is a symbol of connection, and also a perfect work of architecture in its individuality.
Having always been fascinated by bricks, the artist has identified different types and then turned them over, glazing them with bright colors, layering them in large formal sculptures positioned inside the exhibition space. Revealing their inner construction, Du Pasquier activates delicate perspectives and architectural contrasts betweensolid and void, highlighted in turn by the bright colors of the glaze. Overturned, the bricks lose their structuralvirtue and become decorative modules of a pattern that reflects the visual mechanism of the ceramic tiles producedby Mutina.
Nathalie Du Pasquier intersects art and design in a single, fluid language, opening us to an instinctive and at the same time metaphysical landscape. Her work, which ranges through painting, sculpture and installation, investigates the relationship between the subject and space through an exploration of techniques of compositionand display. In BRIC the composition takes us back to its foundation cell—the brick—and to the poetry that arisesfrom its obsessive, rhythmical use, between weaves of light, shadows and structural lines.
The towers are objects and sensations: they represent an enlarged detail, as if we were inside an abstract Lilliputian landscape. Through this installation the artist makes us the physical protagonists of the composition in afluid path that defies any hierarchy among the arts and makes any type of definition seem redundant.
The exhibition BRIC by Nathalie Du Pasquier is a site-specific project entirely produced by Mutina, as the result of an extraordinary dialogue between the artist and the company.
