Damien Pasquale | Dinosaurs Died Minute By Minute After Smoking Down By The Creek Bed

Description

Pasquale’s previous solo exhibition themes looked closely at how we portray our own ‘heroes’.From contrasting the artists own cultural perspective on his father and son relationship in ‘il Piccolo Cowboy: An ode to
Heritage’ (2021) – to the idolatry monoliths in ‘Let’s all Skip Blindly into the Unknown’ (2020) inspired by Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, key figures of the American Abstract Expressionist period.

Damien’s fun and clever technique, the strategic placement nostalgic objects alongside enormous heavily textural based paintings, functioned as a significant layer to enrich the audience’s gaze, interpretation, and more
importantly freely opening up the conversation of inquiry into understanding the exhibition on whole.

This time Pasquale’s attention is caught and centred between the well known and highly respected artist
Gerhard Richter, and the more recent contemporary Lev Khesin, who both adopt a distinctive squeegee technique. Damien’s past employment in the textile printing industry includes a strong connectedness to the ‘squeegee’, a tool mainly used in the screen printing process.

Pasquale describes his own subsistent existence through the title of this exhibition, by aligning with the concept of ‘Existentialism’ – a well known form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and centres on the subjective experience of thinking, feeling, and acting. Pasquale then speculates upon what every
artist most likely endures;

‘… an unruly crisis of overanalysing one’s own existence and art practice riding their own internal tornado like
process, deconstructing and reconstructing visual queues into a semiotic language whilst experiencing an accelerating shift in socioeconomic and historical contexts with unprecedented narratives …’

Damien’s own circumstance bring an intelligent use of duplexity reflected in his use of word play between the
physical and existential. The existence of ‘scraping by’ -which is to live with barely enough money; to be able to buy only the things most needed to succeed at doing something but just barely.

These artworks intend to invoke feeling through a process of repeatedly building layers by manually scraping or
squeegeeing a sticky mix of vibrant pigments and silicone, creating thick rubbery, viscous, visceral, and texturally rich coloured curiosities.

(Derivative titles for the works courtesy of Kurzgesat- In a Nutshell, founded by Phillip Dettmer)