Ariadna Pastorini

Florencia Braga Menéndez Gallery (Buenos Aires). No. 225 – July 2006

Ariadna Pastorini (1962) was one of the artists who crowded the artistic scene of the nineties, when Jorge Gumier Maier created the gallery of the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center. There, a group of artists who approached an aesthetic linked to kitsch, ornamentation and experimentation with different materials emerged. Pastorini has been working since then with sewn fabrics. That line is today at the point of opening, and is evident in the incursion of certain works that are based on clothing design, approaching at the same time the field of sculptural and object art. They are expressions of “soft art”, which produce images where the predominance of the organic establishes a kind of “warm” communication with the viewer. 

Pastorini’s works are costume designs that are impossible to wear, because the artist cancels the function of the object by sewing a purse with a zipper, or making jackets whose sleeves cannot be attached. The sensuality of the fabrics incites the viewer to touch these works that despite the annulment of their functionality, still maintain the attractiveness of the genres the artist selects. 

A golden pillow with synthetic fabric, felt sleeves with studs, stuffed objects, and sensations like the softness of textures, the resistance of rubber, the coldness of vinyl; her entire repertoire of images and prints reminds us of something that no longer is, like the childhood of stuffed toys or the fetishism of rubber on clothes. Pastorini has always been fascinated by the nostalgia of events that have passed, and she captures it in the materials that were typical of each era. In this exhibition, the superimposition of sewn fabrics is unified by handkerchiefs, an object that is repeated in each of her works. Traveling through Europe, she collected handkerchiefs from the sixties, with designs of maps, cities and monuments. They are the souvenirs that tourists take with them as a document or memory of the places they have visited. Thus, the artist assembles the “Pastorini souvenirs” with the fragments of fabrics she found during her trips. With a certain ironic and also nostalgic look, the artist reveals the habit of collecting things to avoid forgetting a moment that, with time, always ends up aging much more than the fleeting intensity of the simple memory. 

BY LAURA BATKIS