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Lot Essay
We are grateful to the Archivio Pascali and Sandro Lodolo for their precious assistance in cataloguing this work.
Quattro trofei di caccia (Four Hunting Trophies) is one of the key works in Pascali's celebrated series of Finte sculture or 'Fake Sculptures' that the artist made in 1966. Consisting of four semi-figurative dinosaur-like forms constructed out of blank canvas and stretched over a hollow wooden armature, these bizarre 'trophies' are deliberately ambiguous in that they both provoke and at the same time reject any precise understanding of what they are. Appearing to lie halfway between the figurative and the abstract, they are one of a series of works in which Pascali developed the notion of play and of artificiality that he had previously introduced into his Armi (Weapons) as a way of exploring the conceptual conventions that mankind has set up in order to explain the world. Perceiving that our understanding of the world is merely an outward projection of our inner imagination, and ever eager to draw a parallel between the world of childhood imaginings and the conventional structures of the adult world, Pascali recognised an innate 'fakeness' underlying all phenomena. Pascali recognised that ultimately the uniqueness of any given object lies not in the object itself but in our idea of it; in the 'image' of it that we construct in our mind. The 'fake sculptures' were a conscious attempt to explore and expose this universal artificiality in a whimsical, playful and tangibly material way.
Conscious, like so many Italian artists, of the imposing weight of their cultural heritage, Pascali saw that our world is made up of a whole 'heritage of images' and that 'just to prevail over these images we must look at them coldly and really physically for what they are and verify what potential they have to continue existing... If this possibility is make-believe', he continued, 'then you can accept it as make-believe, if they're just old, obsolete things, they no longer belong to our history, you can't take them seriously any more, you see, and believe the problems surrounding Mediterranean civilization, etc. Me, in order to feel like a sculptor I practically have to make fake sculptures.' These sculptures, Pascali asserted were 'fake' because they only pretended to be the thing that they represented. 'I pretend to make sculptures', he asserted, 'but they don't become those sculptures that they pretend to be; I want them to become something light, that they are what they are, that's how it went. Being what they are, they are stretched canvas on a ribbed structure, which is oddly similar to sculpture, or some image inside us' (P. Pascali interviewed by Carla Lonzi, 1967, quoted in Arte Povera, C. Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), London, 1999, p. 264- 266).
It is for this reason that many of the 'fake sculptures', like the Quattro trofei di caccia, take as their subject-matter extinct and nearly extinct animals, semi-imaginary creatures and creatures of myth and mystery. For behind all these works lies a sense of perpetual transition and the question of survival; a question that asks what 'images' are relevant or necessary to our contemporary and 'adult' worldview and what can or should be discarded and forgotten. This question gains an added importance in the Quattro trofei di caccia in that here, as in the Armi, the notion of destruction and of choosing to destroy, has been raised by the title, which announces that these suggestive and partial sculptural forms are in fact trophies from a hunt.
The dinosaur-like forms of the sculpture, their vagueness and their partialness convey the idea of the long-lost semi-mythic creatures of a prehistoric past, without defining the precise nature of what they are. Protruding from the wall, or perhaps disappearing into it, as if it were some kind of dividing line in our collective memory, these forms ask how much the wondrous world of our childhood imagination we wish to hold onto. Their fragmentary nature is not only intended to be understood in such a way that they are clearly parts implying a whole, but also collectively in the way that the four forms seem to imply a whole world of fanciful imagination that is at risk of becoming extinct.
Quattro trofei di caccia was first exhibited at the Galleria L'Attico in Rome in 1966 as part of a complete installation of Finte sculture. This groundbreaking exhibition, the follow-up to Pascali's showing of the Armi at the Galleria Sperone the year before, presented a similar vision to that which had seized Fabio Sargentini shortly before the show when he had visited Pascali's studio. 'I was flabbergasted' Sargentini recalled, 'It was... full of white three-dimensional forms, giraffes, dinosaurs, rhinoceroses, hunting trophies, tails of whales, and finally a sea of curved waves that spread across the floor. The space looked like nothing so much as Noah's ark' (F. Sargentini quoted in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-72, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2001, p. 48.)
Presenting a parade of predominantly white monochromatic form, each suggestive, without being explicit, of an organic or animate form, the exhibition must have seemed like a dreamworld in which the austere white walls of the gallery had been impregnated and invaded by the almost cartoon-like forms of Pascali's sculptural animations. Each form a hollow white image, that serves as an ideogram of a known animal or object.
'What matters' Pascali said of these works, 'is that they look like sculptures. I'm not interested in the inside or only the skin part; it really must be this light thickness which forms around it. It's the make-believe which automatically determines the identification with a certain image, a certain word in the dictionary...' (interview with Carla Lonzi, ibid., p.266.). This 'make-believe' quality, conveying a sense that the sculptures are objects that lie half-way between the world of the imagination and that of the physical, material reality of the real world, is essentially what gives these works their resonating power to puzzle and trouble our minds. Quattro trofei di caccia is essentially a material enigma. Each trophy is a hollow replica of an imaginary creature, of an image or idea. In this respect they look like what they are which is physical manifestations of the mental constructions of Pascali's mind.
'What I really think' Pascali once said, 'is that around us there's nothing and you're in the middle of this space where things exist on the edges. You find yourself in this place and because its your own place there are no other places you could belong to... that is you can go to another place, but you come from that place, you see? You say: but if around us there's a void, what kind of place is it? It's a place in the void , but you stay in that place in the void even if it goes somewhere else... But in this place there are a lot of windbags which pop every once in a while, and then another is created; these windbags are full of emptiness, but I created them myself and I hide inside them' (interview with Carla Lonzi, ibid., p. 266).
Quattro trofei di caccia (Four Hunting Trophies) is one of the key works in Pascali's celebrated series of Finte sculture or 'Fake Sculptures' that the artist made in 1966. Consisting of four semi-figurative dinosaur-like forms constructed out of blank canvas and stretched over a hollow wooden armature, these bizarre 'trophies' are deliberately ambiguous in that they both provoke and at the same time reject any precise understanding of what they are. Appearing to lie halfway between the figurative and the abstract, they are one of a series of works in which Pascali developed the notion of play and of artificiality that he had previously introduced into his Armi (Weapons) as a way of exploring the conceptual conventions that mankind has set up in order to explain the world. Perceiving that our understanding of the world is merely an outward projection of our inner imagination, and ever eager to draw a parallel between the world of childhood imaginings and the conventional structures of the adult world, Pascali recognised an innate 'fakeness' underlying all phenomena. Pascali recognised that ultimately the uniqueness of any given object lies not in the object itself but in our idea of it; in the 'image' of it that we construct in our mind. The 'fake sculptures' were a conscious attempt to explore and expose this universal artificiality in a whimsical, playful and tangibly material way.
Conscious, like so many Italian artists, of the imposing weight of their cultural heritage, Pascali saw that our world is made up of a whole 'heritage of images' and that 'just to prevail over these images we must look at them coldly and really physically for what they are and verify what potential they have to continue existing... If this possibility is make-believe', he continued, 'then you can accept it as make-believe, if they're just old, obsolete things, they no longer belong to our history, you can't take them seriously any more, you see, and believe the problems surrounding Mediterranean civilization, etc. Me, in order to feel like a sculptor I practically have to make fake sculptures.' These sculptures, Pascali asserted were 'fake' because they only pretended to be the thing that they represented. 'I pretend to make sculptures', he asserted, 'but they don't become those sculptures that they pretend to be; I want them to become something light, that they are what they are, that's how it went. Being what they are, they are stretched canvas on a ribbed structure, which is oddly similar to sculpture, or some image inside us' (P. Pascali interviewed by Carla Lonzi, 1967, quoted in Arte Povera, C. Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), London, 1999, p. 264- 266).
It is for this reason that many of the 'fake sculptures', like the Quattro trofei di caccia, take as their subject-matter extinct and nearly extinct animals, semi-imaginary creatures and creatures of myth and mystery. For behind all these works lies a sense of perpetual transition and the question of survival; a question that asks what 'images' are relevant or necessary to our contemporary and 'adult' worldview and what can or should be discarded and forgotten. This question gains an added importance in the Quattro trofei di caccia in that here, as in the Armi, the notion of destruction and of choosing to destroy, has been raised by the title, which announces that these suggestive and partial sculptural forms are in fact trophies from a hunt.
The dinosaur-like forms of the sculpture, their vagueness and their partialness convey the idea of the long-lost semi-mythic creatures of a prehistoric past, without defining the precise nature of what they are. Protruding from the wall, or perhaps disappearing into it, as if it were some kind of dividing line in our collective memory, these forms ask how much the wondrous world of our childhood imagination we wish to hold onto. Their fragmentary nature is not only intended to be understood in such a way that they are clearly parts implying a whole, but also collectively in the way that the four forms seem to imply a whole world of fanciful imagination that is at risk of becoming extinct.
Quattro trofei di caccia was first exhibited at the Galleria L'Attico in Rome in 1966 as part of a complete installation of Finte sculture. This groundbreaking exhibition, the follow-up to Pascali's showing of the Armi at the Galleria Sperone the year before, presented a similar vision to that which had seized Fabio Sargentini shortly before the show when he had visited Pascali's studio. 'I was flabbergasted' Sargentini recalled, 'It was... full of white three-dimensional forms, giraffes, dinosaurs, rhinoceroses, hunting trophies, tails of whales, and finally a sea of curved waves that spread across the floor. The space looked like nothing so much as Noah's ark' (F. Sargentini quoted in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-72, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2001, p. 48.)
Presenting a parade of predominantly white monochromatic form, each suggestive, without being explicit, of an organic or animate form, the exhibition must have seemed like a dreamworld in which the austere white walls of the gallery had been impregnated and invaded by the almost cartoon-like forms of Pascali's sculptural animations. Each form a hollow white image, that serves as an ideogram of a known animal or object.
'What matters' Pascali said of these works, 'is that they look like sculptures. I'm not interested in the inside or only the skin part; it really must be this light thickness which forms around it. It's the make-believe which automatically determines the identification with a certain image, a certain word in the dictionary...' (interview with Carla Lonzi, ibid., p.266.). This 'make-believe' quality, conveying a sense that the sculptures are objects that lie half-way between the world of the imagination and that of the physical, material reality of the real world, is essentially what gives these works their resonating power to puzzle and trouble our minds. Quattro trofei di caccia is essentially a material enigma. Each trophy is a hollow replica of an imaginary creature, of an image or idea. In this respect they look like what they are which is physical manifestations of the mental constructions of Pascali's mind.
'What I really think' Pascali once said, 'is that around us there's nothing and you're in the middle of this space where things exist on the edges. You find yourself in this place and because its your own place there are no other places you could belong to... that is you can go to another place, but you come from that place, you see? You say: but if around us there's a void, what kind of place is it? It's a place in the void , but you stay in that place in the void even if it goes somewhere else... But in this place there are a lot of windbags which pop every once in a while, and then another is created; these windbags are full of emptiness, but I created them myself and I hide inside them' (interview with Carla Lonzi, ibid., p. 266).