DANTE – L’ENFER, talking about it
Chant XXI
Paper engraved and dry paste, 40 x 30 cm
Photo by Hada Ra
Release on march 21, 2024
Illustration of the XXXIV chants by Pascal Pistacio
Translation Emmanuel Tugny
Ardavena éditions (Collection Les Cahiers d’or)
https://ardavena.com/lenfer-de-dante-illustre/
https://www.fnac.com/a20249110/Dante-Alighieri-L-Enfer
Fragments
Works by Pascal Pistacio
Confronting Dante requires “forgetting modesty and pride”, says Pascal Pistacio from the outset. But it’s a challenge, just as Virgil was a source of inspiration for Dante. Without this sequence, there is no art history.
An element of the tale with a complex narrative structure, chant XXI, suggests :
Et s’il vous plait de pousser plus avant,
Montez jusqu’à cette grotte : on y trouve
Une autre roche qui livre chemin.
(Traduction Emmanuel Tugny)
(And please to push further,
Climb up to this cave, where you’ll find
Another rock that leads the way.)
Which path is it? Where does it lead?
So we assume that the XXI chant is a kind of trigger, a starting point for the art to which this path leads.
The question of support for this has been clarified. It is a cave and a rock, and thus the rock art to which Dante refers.
Paper will be Pascal Pistacio’s creative material in order to create a space of representation, a projection of Dante’s story into another dimension.
He will incise the paper with a “firm and gentle” gesture, as he would on the wall of a cave, the very gesture of the sculptor as he develops it in his usual artistic practice.
“I sculpt blindly,” he explains, until the drawing appears, revealing unexpected shapes. This combination of material and random gesture makes it possible to render “the movement in the fixity that is the object of art” according to Claudel.
The omnipresent movement that animates the figures in rock art and gives them a particular relief.
Such is the case with the abundant forms present in Pascal Pistacio’s etched papers.
They fall, sliding down in a downward movement that echoes Dante’s infernal journey.
The use of dry pastel applied to the paper with a finger produces highly sensual chromatic effects that echo Dante’s pictorial narrative.
Just as the fragility and vulnerability of the human figure is the subject of Pascal Pistacio’s sculptural work. In this series of engravings, he confronts us with the human soul, its torments, the human experience at its most violent, cruel and inhuman.
But art means that “beauty and vibrancy are the only things that count”, he adds. Art, for Baudelaire, is the escape from hell and evil, the gateway to the infinite through beauty.
Amélie Pironneau
Art historian
Exhibition curator