Beatrice Pasquali

francesco girondini arte contemporanea, Verona
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In her first solo show Beatrice Pasquali has introduced works characterized by a keen manual dimension bound to the use of materials: sculptures in natural-colored wax, modeled and finished with shiny or matte varnish. Her children’s or adult heads and busts, realistic in size and shape but expressionless, seem to be objects taken from medicine. They are anatomical studies to which the rules of other sciences, from architecture to geography, have been applied by the artist, who wishes to superimpose an external grid over human forms in an effort to codify them.

For example, in Registro della schiena Pasquali molded a wax vertebral column and, on two specular tables in plexiglas, has mapped out the straight lines that form the back as if they composed the scaffolding of a building. On certain areas of the half bust Agnese/Schema and the face of Il fabbricante di cuffie the artist has drawn white lines like those traced on topographical maps, while in Vitro she has repeated a child’s head three times, thus compounding vision in an orthogonal projection that follows the rules of geometry. Finally, in Stereotomia, she has divided the head of a newborn baby with wire—a play on the title of the work, which refers to a stone-cutting technique that results in two perfect halves.

All of the artist’s prototypes were presented in vitro. Vitrea, moreover, was the title of the exhibition. Constructed to be as close to reality as possible, the sculptures reproduced the external morphology of the human body with an attention to detail reminiscent of the precision of Renaissance anatomical drawings. Through the horrific aspect of her work, found above all in the infant’s heads, Pasquali filters the complex and still current relationship between art and science, supporting Georges Braque’s assertion that “Art exists to perturb, science to reassure.”




Mariella Rossi
Translation by Amanda Coulson