Everyday’s aesthethics

The project plan is clear: to make at least one artwork a day for the whole year. The main difficulty is encountered during the reading, when you try to make sense of each little work in order to find a red line that links them all. Soon you realize it’s a tough exercise, so much as a useless one. You won’t be able to build a structure, make up a system that establishes solid relations between the various creative interventions, like they were elements of the same sequence. The only orderly form is the time frame, limited to the marking of the general edges of the operation. Time is the container of the countless actions, marked in order to avoid losing their memory within the flux of life.

Encapsulating time between a beginning and an end assumes there is perspective logic: 2004, the numerical measurement of the artworks. Each exhibited item is, in fact, dated in order to document the course of the work done. In this way it is possible to establish a pattern of creativity. Let’s take, for example, the most prolific day of the month of January, Wednesday 14^th, with eleven artworks, or the month of February, where the chart is topped by Monday 9^th with thirteen works. In both cases we are in front of ink or pencil drawings, relatively simple and fast techniques that favor the increase in production. Saturday March 6^th is at third place with eight artworks, and again the techniques are similar, ink and watercolor on paper. Thanks to the updated archive available on www.stefanopasquini.net one can complete the provisional chart – who writes is still in the month of December – of the most prolific days of the year:

1. Monday, February 9^th – 13 –
2. Wednesday, January 14^th – 11 –
3. Saturday, March 6^th – 8 –
4. Saturday, January 10^th – 6 –
5. Wednesday, April 14^th – 6 –
6. Friday, January 9^th – 5 –
7. Sunday, January 25^th – 5 –
8. Sunday, February 1^st – 5 –
9. Wednesday, April 28^th – 5 –

In order to maintain this type of classification one can also work by chronological measurements. The most prolific year is January with 73 realized artworks. February follows suit with 56, March with 50, April with 49. After a healthy start, production reaches stability between 35 (June) and 48 works (October). You could compile more statistics and diagrams, even advance target plans and future forecasts, as if Pasquini’s production was comparable of that of a factory. All you need to do is take a look at the weekly updated website to verify the latest results of Pasquini™. From here to a weekly competition to guess the number of artworks made each week, a Lotto-art, it’s a small step, and the times are ready.

Today, like never before, so many mental and economical resources are finalized to the making of games of luck, whose prize can change an unsatisfied life. The work 2004 can be seen as an answer to this malaise. All you need to do is get offline, wait for the end of the year and experience the work in the gallery. The technical control imposed by the scrupulous updating of the website over any creative solution can be detrimental, and menace to reduce art to a mere information data.

It is thus necessary to exit the virtual gallery of time, the analytical document list, and live the effective quality of the works.

After a first examination we notice the diversity of techniques and media. Pencils, watercolors, acrylics, ink, wine or blood stains are applied to paper or cardboard, train tickets, uncashed checks… every surface is good as long as it welcomes a track sign, every media is good as long as it contains information. That’s not all. Pasquini makes abundant use of photographic prints, digital files that can contain images, text, graphic PDF documents, and music. The presence of advanced technology solutions is significant, but doesn’t imply a lack of tradition, such as the use of the ready made object, some handcraft sewing, and even performance art and happenings, reaching maximum accomplishment with Yumi, born on July 19^th. A diversity, this, that doesn’t undervalue the body of the 2004 work. In order to guarantee its conceptual identity there is always a coherent approach in regards to reality. A free and light attitude veined by an irony that questions any dogmatic position.

This much versatility reflects an open mindedness ready to value the aesthetics and noetics that are present in every day contingency. You need to know how to catch them, you need to be there. The presence of someone with active senses is needed in order to read, on the plane of life, the reflexes of an art to make true, to display as an object. In reality, to an exquisitely conceptual view such as Pasquini’s, even the worst case scenario can become an orgy of intellectual stimuli. The same perceptive apparatus, aware of the work in progress, becomes more sensitive of the aesthetic dimension of ordinary life, discovering an inexhaustible source of creative remands every day. Matter-of-factly, everything can be declared as art, as long as it is an established artist to do so. And Pasquini is such an artist, as it is ironically certified by the Real Artist Certificate dated February 29^th. At this point it is clear that the creative activity is not the goal, but just a means to something else.

The purpose of realizing at least one artwork every day overcomes the questions around the making and its reason. Whoever comes close to 2004 with the intention of reading every single work is destined to get lost in the semantic maze of everyday living. Many works are so much linked to Pasquini’s private life to become almost hermetic. It is necessary, thus, to look further than the product and reflect over the process that generated it. It is a pervasive process that questions the notion of quality over quantity, informs day to day life and animates it with colors that are usually under a pile of dust otherwise called routine. This everyday aesthetic is capable of lightening the obtuse consistency of life, alleviating the malaise by the cleaved sound of matter. Instead of looking for a refuge in the hope of an extraordinary resolution event, Pasquini goes down to ordinary life to find it enriched of aesthetic values.

Daniele Astrologo, 2004