2022. 5. 21 – 6. 26
Mario PASQUALOTTO

Pigment Gallery will darken to make way for light. From May 21 to June 26, Pigment Gallery presents the new exhibition Dive! Immersion, of the artist Mario Pasqualotto. Pasqualotto, a multidisciplinary artist with a long history at a national and international level, returns to present an exhibition in Barcelona after 12 years since his last solo show in the city. In the main room of the Pigment Gallery, sheltered from outside light, an unprecedented series of Pasqualotto’s characteristic lightboxes will be presented. The works will glow in various colors, “painted” with plastic bags and illuminated by LED lights, bringing jellyfish, plants, and aquatic landscapes to life. Dive! invites us to immerse ourselves and reflect on the consumption of plastic, the pollution of the seas, and the climate crisis.

Over the years, Pasqualotto has explored multiple languages from installation, performance, or painting-sculpture, always questioning the traditional way of doing painting, and looking for ways to investigate its limits and reinterpret it. Heir to the Arte Povera artists he saw during his adolescence in the 1960s when he lived with his family in Milan; such as Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, or Jannis Kounellis; he absorbed the use of humble and poor materials, adapting them to create new works and exploring painting without using oils or acrylics, if not, looking for alternatives to painting. The various materials that he adds to his work allow him to create forms that seem pictorial without being so, modifying them and changing their characteristics, adapting them to his aesthetic and conceptual needs.

In Dive! Immersion, Pasqualotto will present an unprecedented series of lightboxes. A language with which he began in 2008 and which allows him to “paint without painting” and explore the pictorial possibilities of plastic bags. The jellyfish and seascapes in his works are obtained from the accumulation of bags that he has been collecting from multiple places and countries, and which he illuminates with LED lights from behind, accentuating the intensity of the color and defining the shapes represented. Finally, he frames them in iron and this is how he brings his fascinating lightboxes to life. The plastic bags are an essential piece to understanding the ecological reflection of the artist. We use them, discard them, reuse them or find them scattered in the environment.

Mario Pasqualotto (Barcelona, 1953) is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates various languages such as performance, installation, painting, or painting-sculpture. His themes are associated with human nature, its weaknesses, and, more recently, with ecology. From a very young age he grew up influenced by the Arte Povera that appeared in Milan in the 1960s, and from whom he adopted the use of found materials and added them to his work to experience pictorial possibilities without using traditional painting. Throughout his career he has worked between Barcelona and his studio in New Jersey (USA), Italy and Germany. He has had exhibitions in New York and Hong Kong, the most outstanding in Spain being an individual exhibition at the Fundació Vila Casas, the Llum Barcelona project in 2020 at the Mies Van der Rohe, several exhibitions at the Fundació La Caixa, among others.

Pigment Gallery
Carrer de Trafalgar, 70, 08010 Barcelona, Spain
23 Rue du Roi de Sicile, 75004 Paris, France
+34 934 528 162 / +34 658850773

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