Pino Pascali (1935-1968)

"(...) Unfortunately European space is very different from American space: rather than belonging to action it belongs to a reflection on action, you see? What the Americans can permit themselves is the luxury of taking something and nailing it on to the canvas and a painting emerges; or take a comic strip and re-do it and the painting is a painting because in their gestures they summarized historically what truly is their civilization, the most advanced from a technological point of view. Our civilization, instead, is a civilization which on a technological level is behind with respect to the American so that a direct action between man and material is made (...)" "I try to do what I like to do; ultimately that's the only system that works for me. I don't think a sculptor does hard work: he plays, the way a painter plays, the way anyone who does what he likes plays. Playing games is not just what children do; everything is a game, isn't it? Some people work: childhood games turn into adolescent games, adolescent games turn into the ones in your adult life, but they're still games. At a certain point you are in an office, if it's unpleasant work you'll want a fast car to go out and take a ride in, and that's precisely because you have a job you don't like, and so you put everything into it. Not in the sense of playing for its own sake, but it's another matter, in the sense of man's normal activities, right? Children play seriously too; it's a learning system, their games are set up to experiment with things, to find out about things and at the same time to go beyond them (...)"

Pino Pascali, Interview with Carla Lonzi (Extract from), 1967