Alejandro Pasquale
Alejandro Pasquale (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983).
According to Alejandro Pasquale, we are what we dream of. This is the title of one of his works, and in it he compresses practically all his particular and pictorial world. In this painting and in this title we find all the questions that the difficult equation of his work seems to propose to us. Magic as the central theme; the mask as a constant trap; play as the perfect script; nature as the absolute answer. All his work has revolved for years around these axes that he combines in different ways, producing in all cases a visual challenge to the spectator, who easily falls in love with the attraction of the perfect composition and the magnificent workmanship that each of his works offers.
Everything is beautiful, everything is perfectly made, everything is recognisable, everything seems very simple, but nevertheless nobody really knows what is happening there. I sincerely believe that not even the author himself knows, otherwise he would have already solved his own imaginary iconographic labyrinth.
But no, he can’t. The author is trapped in the dream to which he returns repeatedly, because first and foremost he is what he dreams of. What are those continuous masks? What are those exotic and healing plants doing? And that greenish blue that invades the atmosphere in all his landscapes, that constantly takes us back to Patinir? What are they playing at? And why are there always birds?
We are what we dream, but we are what we feel, what we live, what we love, what we hate, what we suffer, what we eat, what we read, what we hear, what we sing, what we wish, what we project… We are our truths and our lies, and we are also what we paint.
And yes, Alejandro Pasquale is everything in those paintings: a child and many masks.
A man-child with all the questions on his shoulders, with all the pains and the yearnings screaming through the parallel world that the brushes offer him; a child with something unsolvable that seems to like to gloat constantly over that wound of the past and of the permanent and active subconscious, that does not stop screaming at the moment when a pencil opens the door to that other dimension: representation.
Painting-dreaming. These paintings are dreams raised from the consciousness of reason. And to interpret them as I intend to, is a useless undertaking. Therefore, let’s take them to our own dream space and let them speak for themselves. Let’s look at them and close our eyes.
Shhh… Shhh, shhh! Let’s listen to their breathing, the delicate fluttering of the birds, let’s be seduced by what they call the secret life of the plants and let’s put aside the questions.
And if we come across that immense melancholy that seems to preside over that sphere of the world, let us not be frightened and let that which we know we cannot decipher be expressed, but which we will understand if we do not ask it questions.
Perhaps there is that strange uneasiness that all life carries, the mystery of simple flowers and those with strange names, the impossibility of a garden imposed on us when we are pure forest and in general our bitter acceptance of having lost the paradise that, nevertheless, we feel still lives within us.
Rafael Doctor Roncero, Madrid.
(Text made for the individual exhibition “Portals” in Quimera gallery, year 2018)
Carrer Aribau, 75
Barcelona, Catalonia
