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Bachi da setola acrylic brushes and metal dimensions variable Executed in 1968 PROVENANCE Galerie Iolas, Paris, 1968. Luciano Anselmino, 1976. Sergio Casoli, Milan. Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1990. EXHIBITION Paris, Galerie Iolas, Pino Pascali, 1968. Vicenza, Basilica Palladiana, Arte del XX secolo nelle collezioni vicentine, October 1998-January 1999, p. 198 (illustrated). Siena, Museo delle Papesse, Savinio-Pascali, February-May 1999 Tokyo, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Silent Friendship, 1960-1990: 7 artists, June-September 1999, p. 39 (illustrated). NOTES Pino Pascali's fictional universe goes beyond any sense of measure. Confronted with fake weapons, fantastic canvas-made animals or, in the case of Bachi da setola, with gigantic multicoloured worms, the viewers of his work often lose any sense of scale and equilibrium. Bachi da setola, an installation first presented at Galeria L'Attico in Rome, in 1968, is a work based on a play on words "seta" (silk) and "setola" (rough bristles of a brush), which transforms the term bachi da seta that normally evokes silkworms. Challenging sensorial perception, this astonishing work playfully opposes the roughness of the bristles with the theoretical smoothness of silk to evoke a sense of dichotomy between the artificiality of the industrial world and the reality of raw Nature. In addition, Pascali's worms have grown from minuscule, colourless animals to become enormous, vivid and brightly coloured creatures that have lost their naturalness in favour of a extraordinary yet frightening toy appearance. In doing so, Pascali subverts the noble activity of sculpting and transforms it into an immature game, that recalls the artist's Finte sculptures (Fake sculptures) series of 1966. With this diversion, Pascali, who always asserted that he "pretend(ed) to make sculptures", comments on nature and on the poetry of materials - even the most trivial and banal of them. Pascali began his career as a stage director and designer of commercials - a fact that seems to relate him to several American Pop artists. In fact, the sense of lost youth and the rupture of scale that emerge from Bachi da setola can be seen to certain works by Claes Oldenburg. But Pascali's alteration of banality is infinitely more sensual and poetic than the blatant commercialism of Pop imagery. In the catalogue of the exhibition at L'Attico, the artist joined a series of black and white photographs, picturing himself alongside monkeys, with primitive attributes and tribal incantations. In this way, Pascali 'The Performer' gave a supernatural life to his sculptures and reiterated their bizarre presence. Pascali's 1968 show at L'Attico was to be his last artistic testimony; a few months later, on the 11 September 1968, he died in a motorbike accident. His friend Jannis Kounellis, at this occasion, wrote a vibrant epitaph in which he pictured Pascali's imagery as "the dream of a world imagined during childhood but as the construction of his own identity and also as a foundation of the world.".