Pino Pascali's Great Reptile, the dinosaur that invites us not to take ourselves too seriously

It is hard to think that one of the works of art that has become a symbol of the twentieth century in Livorno, Pino Pascali’s Great Reptile , spent part of its existence buried in a basement. The City of Livorno had purchased it in 1967, as part of the eighth and final edition of the Amedeo Modigliani Prize, for the sum of three hundred and fifty thousand liras. That is, just over three thousand euros in 2022. A meager, ridiculous sum when one considers that the following year Pascali, at the height of his career and success, would exhibit at the Venice Biennale, shortly before his fatal motorcycle accident. The Municipality of Livorno had been far-sighted: today there is much insistence in the city that The Great Reptile was the first work by Pino Pascali purchased by a public institution. Then evidently the municipality had forgotten about it, as often happened (and as sometimes unfortunately still happens) when a municipal administration had to manage a contemporary or recent past work, and for seven years the work remained in the dark, risking damage that was difficult to repair. The Apulian artist’s Great Dinosaur would resurface in 1974, when a group of art critics began planning the future Museum of Progressive Art, which would be located in Villa Maria, where part of the Labronica Library is now housed.

The Great Reptile would play a central role in the layout of the new museum, and it therefore needed to be restored. Elio Marchegiani, who had lived in Livorno until 1965, was a close friend of Pino Pascali’s, and had been called upon by Vera Durbè to put his hand to his friend’s work in order to do justice to the neglect that had outraged it, was in charge of the intervention. “A truly bewildering request,” Marchegiani would recount in an interview. “Vera Durbè and later also the critic Calvesi, who had awarded Pascali a prize, pointed out to me that only I, who had had a frequentation in Pascali’s studio, and also a period of hospitality, could, having seen him work, but also because of the manual experience I possessed, deal with the cleaning and restoration of the work, knowing the secrets of its execution. So it was: I accepted the assignment and had the compliments of Vera Durbè and Maurizio Calvesi.”

The Museo d’Arte Progressiva had reserved an entire room for the Great Reptile : the silhouette of Pascali’s being appeared, solitary, at the center of an unadorned setting that enhanced the animal’s profile. It is a work that lies somewhere between painting and sculpture, and that fits into the same research that was being conducted at the time by artists such as Piero Manzoni, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, and Turi Simeti: moving on the border between the two arts, playing on the millennial relationships between painting and sculpture, hybridizing their means, contaminating their outcomes and practices. Pascali had found his way with what he called “faux sculptures”: they were nothing more than ribbed structures on which the artist stretched a blank canvas, to imitate the forms, the appearance and, one would say, even the weight of marble, stone sculptures. Because they are large, monumental sculptures, but very light, since they are built from materials that are themselves light, and hollow inside. And then, unlike most of his colleagues, Pascali had not severed ties with phenomenal reality, which indeed was the basis of his mock sculptures: it is mainly animals that move his playful imagination. Prehistoric ones, in particular: the Great Reptile reminds us of a dinosaur, but without seeking verisimilitude. It is reduced to the essential, investigated in its most elementary forms, it seems to come to life from the drawing of a child who traces the outline of the dinosaur on the sheet of his notebook: the long neck, the small head, the tail, the scales along the spine.

It can certainly be observed that Pino Pascali had well in mind the examples of Hans Arp and Constantin Brâncu?i, he knew the sought-after sharpness of their works, he knew the balance of a formal simplification that condensed nature into the poetry of those elegant lines, he knew the unpredictability of Arp and the desire for elevation of Brâncu?i. Vittorio Rubiu likened Pascali’s Great Reptile , and his animals in general, to Alexander Calder’s Stabiles . However, it is in the almost childlike purity of this work that its most original dimension must be found, a purity that, by investing the sculpture with a delicate lightness, strips it of its solemnity to bring it closer to us who observe it, a purity charged with an irony that allows the work to finger d’be what it is not, and that allows the relative to grasp on the one hand the harmony of the synthesis of Pascali’s work, and on the other hand “the rightness of those clean and precise cuts, the beauty of those profiles,” Rubiu wrote, as if the observer is given to enter the process of working on the work. “And it is then,” the critic continued, “that the monumentality and at the same time the lightness of these animals that look like sculptures, albeit ’fake,’ albeit made of nothing [...] are revealed. Not only the lightness of removing seriousness from the sculpture, but the lightness that comes from the very use and color of the material, that white that expands as it were to the taut surface of the canvas and transforms the space into an image.”

Pino Pascali introduced the poetry of lightness into the research of object painting in the 1960s: it is here that the originality of his Great Reptile is to be found. With him, the investigation into the possibility of breaking down the frontier between painting and sculpture wears a playful, brilliant, if you will, even lighthearted guise. Today, his work is still in the middle of a room of its own: it stands out in the center of the path of the new Museum of the City of Livorno, in the Venezia district, where the City’s contemporary art collection has also been placed. After the closure of the Museo d’Arte Progressiva, the work was first moved to the Museo Civico di Villa Mimbelli, and then with the opening of the new museum in 2018 it found its permanent home. One room only for the Great Reptile, but with a completely different atmosphere: from the white walls of Villa Maria, Pino Pascali’s dinosaur found itself in the late Baroque nave of the Luogo Pio church, which has been deconsecrated and become part of the museum itinerary. The Great Reptile stands out in the space of the high altar, under the 18th-century stuccoes, in the large space designed in 1713 by Giovanni del Fantasia.

And it likes to think that, in this place, Pino Pascali’s reptile manages to convey its content better than ever. His work is also an invitation not to take oneself too seriously, especially if one moves in an environment, that of art, which in terms of ambiguity, duplicity, vacuity and assorted pretenses has little to learn from others. It was recalled above that, in 1968, Pino Pascali was taking part in his first and unfortunately last Venice Biennale. That edition would go down in history as the “Police Biennale,” for the clashes between students and police that occurred on the sidelines of the opening. Many were the artists who reacted by protesting: Pascali wrote a telegram expressing condemnation toward all, and decided to have the hall closed with his works. “Like a boy who has become ’unbearable,’ Pascali no longer tolerates the hypocrisy of the adult world and, by playing, destabilizes it,” wrote Rachele Ferrario. “After all, the feeling of revolt is in his own sculptures.” And the Great Reptile does not shy away from this feeling of revolt: that great dinosaur continues to be subversive, with its childlike lightness, with its lyrical essentiality.

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