Andrea Pascal (IT, 1984 - lives and works in Amsterdam, NL) is a visual artist, mainly working with installation, painting and text. Pascal’s research concentrates on the topics of sexuality in our global society, in particular by looking at how economics, politics, artistic production and everyday rituals are all reflected within the enclosed space of mainstream pornography. Pascal often makes use of appropriated imagery in his projects, playing with the concepts of originality and "death of the author" and being faithful to the maxima of "art as theft": nothing new is ever created in our regime of endlessly ruminated images, so why not just stealing and remixing?
GRADUATION PROJECT
Wunderkammer
In his last series “Wunderkammer” Pascal collected found images that are paintings or other sorts of pictures (like posters or photographs) hung in the background of porn sets. By bringing to foreground, reframing and finally reproducing these images again as original paintings, Pascal comments on the concepts of originality and appropriation. Working with images originally featured in mainstream pornography is also subtly and ironically highlighting the status of contemporary art as a production-consumption cycle that mimics the economy of pornography. In his installation, besides the series of painting “Wunderkammer”, the artist also presents some of excerpts from his research journal: a number of fragmentary notes where he reflects on pornography, masculinity and originality.
