For its third participation in Paris Internationale, APALAZZOGALLERY will present a selection of works by Italian artist Lucia Pescador (1943, Italy) and NYC-based artist Roberto Juarez (1952, Chicago) alongside a series of photographic etchings by Angolan photographer Edson Chagas (1977, Angola) and sculptures and paintings by Nathalie Du Pasquier (1957, Bordeaux).
The curatorial project revolves around the rediscovery and memory of the 20th century: the street corners photographed before gentrification and the artistic rise of a queer artist who narrates the life of New York’s homosexual community before the spread of AIDS and its tragic consequences. Pescador explores themes related to memory and its stratification, using reused materials such as prints, painted surfaces, and old photographs. Pescador’s dreamlike works are accompanied by a body of paintings on paper by Juarez, a prominent figure in the queer underground art scene of New York’s East Village in the 1980s and 1990s, which aesthetic is defined by a quick and material brushstroke, oscillating between abstract and figurative. Finally, a new suite of photographs by Chagas, which iconographically diverges from his previous OIKONOMOS and TIPO PASSE for its more abstract aesthetic. Nathalie Du Pasquier’s canvases are matched with her installations and sculptures.

EDSON CHAGAS | NATHALIE DU PASQUIER | ROBERTO JUAREZ | LUCIA PESCADOR
BOOTH 4.3

Edson Chagas (b. 1977, Luanda, Angola) lives and works between Luanda, Angola and Lisbon, Portugal.
Before his studies in photojournalism in London and documentary photography in Newport, Edson Chagas spent most of his life in Luanda, the capital of Angola. He was born in this city in 1977, two years after the beginning of the civil war, and returned here when his European experiences ended. The importance of the three cities in the artist’s biography is revealed by the photographs in the Found Not Taken series, started in 2008. The shots depict everyday objects abandoned in the streets, some still in good condition, others worn out or semi-destroyed: Chagas collects them during his urban explorations and places them in a new context, eventually photographing them against carefully chosen backgrounds, whose textures and color contrasts he exploits. If the dislocation of the objects from one point to another in the city gives them new value, in a kind of artist’s recycling that saves them from the obsolescence to which they are condemned, at the same time it makes it almost impossible to determine which photographs were taken in Luanda, London, or Newport. A subtle critique of the society of consumption and waste, which progressively shortens the life cycle of goods and unifies the fabric of the city from one part of the world to another, is thus posed.
Compared to the end of the war in 2002, Angola now has one of the highest growth rates on the African continent thanks to international economic agreements. Chagas continues his investigation into his country’s new consumer habits with the photographs in Oikonomos, 2011-2012 in which he portrays himself with his head covered by plastic or canvas bags decorated with a variety of prints: British and American flags, Chinese ideograms, Western product logos and even Barack Obama’s face. Subtracting himself from the camera lens, the artist embodies the depersonalized identity of the consumer, homogenized by the detritus of contemporary culture.
An important piece of his research is the series Tipo Passe, 2012-2014. The anonymity of the portraits is recreated by means of traditional African masks, worn, however, over modern clothes and decontextualized from their original meaning. Ironically, as the title in Portuguese also suggests, the cropping of the frame from the shoulders up makes these images similar to photo ID cards, although here what makes recognition possible is missing. For each one, the real or assumed identities of the people hidden beneath the masks are given, whose European- derived names associated with local surnames recall Angola’s long past as a colony.

Nathalie Du Pasquier (b. 1957, Bordeaux, France) lives and works in Milan.
Her career began as an autodidact, traveling at a very early age through Africa, Australia, and India, reading and observing other cultures. In 1979 she arrived in Italy, first in Rome and then in Milan, where she met several designers who set her along the path of European and urban 20th century culture. In 1981 she became part of the Memphis group, for which she was to design numerous fabrics, carpets, and other items. In 1987 she decided to concentrate entirely on painting and through the observation of works, from antiquity to the 20th century, she produced oil paintings of still life with simplified compositions. Over time, the everyday objects depicted in her paintings were replaced by wooden constructions made by the artist herself. Thus, her work becomes a skilful game of juxtapositions between flat surfaces and three-dimensional objects capable of sculpting space and providing a new representation, destabilising the traditional boundaries that separate works of art from their inherent exhibition structures. Through her work, Du Pasquier explores the links that are established between objects and the space in which they are located. This investigation manifests itself in a multitude of forms: paintings, sculptures, drawings, models, constructions, books and ceramics. The artist constantly acts between the tangible and the intangible, reality and fiction, the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional.

Recent institutional exhibitions include Arrengements 1993-2023, Hotel des Arts - Mediterranean Center of Art, Tolone, France (2024); PAINTINGS OF THINGS. PAINTINGS OF OBJECTS, Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2023); Nathalie du Pasquier Chez Eux, Carte Blanche, curated by Yvon Lambert, Centre Des Monuments Nationaux, Ville à Savoye, Poissy, France (2022); Geometric Opulence, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2022); Campo Marte, MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome, Italy (2021); Campo di Marte, Musée régional d’art contemporain, Sérignan, France (2022); Memphis Plastic Field, Musée des Arts Décoratifs et du Design, Bordeaux, France (2019-2020); BRIC, Mutina for Art, Fiorano Modenese, Italy (2019); Fair Game Leipzing, GfZK - Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany (2019); Future, Former, Fugitive: A French Scene, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2019); Les is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Massachusetts, US (2019); Fair Game, MGLC - International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2018); Nathalie Du Pasquier: Other Rooms, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2018); Nathalie Du Pasquier: Private Collections, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal (2017); Big Objects Not Always Silent, ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, US (2017); Big Objects Not Always Silent, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2016) and Material Culture, Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design, Geneva, Switzerland (2015).

The artist’s work is included in numerous public collections such as: Cnap – Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris, France; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida, US; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, US; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, New York, US; Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, US; Modernism Museum Mount Dora, Mount Dora, Florida, US; Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney, Australia; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, US; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana, US; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, US; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, US; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, US.

Roberto Juarez (b. 1952 Chicago, US) lives and works in New York City, US.
After his studies at San Francisco Art Institute and UCLA, he moved to New York where he was one of the protagonists of the West Village art scene in the 80s.
Many places, many times intermingle in the work of Roberto Juarez.
His life is so much a part of his paintings, that each new body of work introduces subjects, styles and motifs that seem to differ radically from previous work. Consequently, his succession of solo gallery exhibitions, which have typically occurred in two-year intervals since 1980, operate like time-lapse photographs. Between exhibitions, however, Juarez lives a life filled with travel, new relationships, literature, music, film, and art, all of which provide stimuli for his paintings. Juarez often combines many different types of images, using both casual, small sketches he makes almost daily, as well as found botanical and other prints as sources. The dynamic between intended shapes and those that happen in the rush of emotional brushwork convey a physical sense of the artist’s pictorial dance. These non-hierarchical images allude to the way artist’s through the centuries have fixed the fleeting aspects of nature by using natural shapes and colors of flowers into permanent motifs, into symbols.
Viewers confront his personal experiences and perceptions, mixed with history and myth, transformed into a space that conflates western perspective with eastern illusionism. Juarez is an artist not afraid to travel among artistic disciplines, to draw from myriad sources for his work. Recently, Juarez has used printed materials from popular culture, such as Art Forum advertisements, which he rips up and then collages into studies for much larger paintings.

Lucia Pescador (Voghera, 9 February 1943) graduated in Decoration with Giovanni Usellini at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, beginning her artistic career in the 1960s.
Ipotesi astronomiche, Ipotesi d’identità, Lo schedario del colore del cielo, Reliquiario botanico, Raccolta d’ombre (Astronomical Hypotheses, Identity Hypotheses, The Sky Colour list, Botanical Reliquary, Shadow Collection) are some of the series from the 1970s in which the artist uses a ‘scientific’ method to visualise irrational projections of the future.
The dialogue between culture and nature was also the theme of interest in the following years. Between 1977 and 1989, Lucia Pescador was part of the collective Gruppo Metamorfosi with Alessandra Bonelli, Lucia Sterlocchi and Gabriella Benedini, exhibiting together for the first time in 1977 at the exhibition Dalla natura alla ragione (From Nature to Reason) at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, presented by Anty Pansera.
From the early 1990s the artist started a large cycle of works which are to be considered emblematic for her current production as well: Inventario di fine secolo con la mano sinistra (Inventory of the End of the Century with the Left Hand) in which the artist copies fragments of the 20th century art by cataloging them under headings like ‘Arte’, ‘Artefice’, ‘Natura’, ‘Hotel du Nord’, ‘Enigmistica’, ‘Geometrie’, ‘Decorazione’ (Art, Maker, Nature, Hotel du Nord, Puzzles, Geometries, Decoration).
The use of the left hand (despite the fact that she is right-handed) enhances the expressive and interpretative aspect and is well suited to evoke the process of deconstruction of academic representation that took place during the 20th century: “I copy in order to regain with the wrong hand the images that move me and belong to me. (…) I try to stop, by copying the images that fly on old sheets of paper nailing them to the wall. I try to reconstruct my own sense of life.” Her interest in culture and memory is ascribable to a postmodernist attitude, albeit in a poetic key, where drawing is still essential.