Artist's book.
Campo di Marte was devised in March 2020, at a time when Nathalie Du Pasquier was not painting. After cutting out photos of paintings produced between the 1980s and 2020, the French artist then placed them in a sequence as if they were a series of typefaces, focusing solely on their formal qualities and the scope for interpretation offered by their assembly. What comes out is an enchanting game of nonsense, an everyday surrealism in which the images make up sentences of sorts, interwoven with various elements taken from the world of books: titles, poems or mere calculations – times when the artist was lost for words. Campo di Marte will also be the name of an exhibition, curated by Luca Lo Pinto, due to be held at the MACRO in Rome at the end of 2020. As Du Pasquier states: "The book was supposed to come out at the same time as the exhibition opening. That won't be the case, but it doesn't matter as they really are two separate things. This paperback is not a catalogue at all: it's something you can browse through even while sitting on the underground."
A famous
designer and co-founder of the
Memphis group in Milan in 1981, Nathalie Du Pasquier (born 1957 in Bordeaux, France, lives in Milan, Italy) accompanied the (post)modern adventure around designer
Ettore Sottsass, with the creation of objects, fabrics, carpets, and furniture. In 1986, she started devoting herself exclusively to two- and three-dimensional
painting. Memphis's radicalism and formal inventiveness measured solely in terms of a scathing and iconoclastic postmodernism erased a little too quickly the adventure's modern foundations. Nathalie Du Pasquier's paintings are a perfect revelation of these connections: axonometric compositions applied to painting, the palette of muffled colors, objects, when they are present in the compositions, wink at the purism of a Corbusier or an Ozenfant. Mixed with memories and assimilations arising from the most tridimensional Suprematism–the architectones–some paintings and constructions also give prominence to this history of art and the applied arts.
