Damien Pasquale
Biography
Damien Pasquale
Damien Pasquale is a Brisbane based abstract artist with a formal art education graduating with the Trevor Lyons Award from The Griffith University- Queensland College of Art in 2003.
With a commercial screen printing and graphic design background as well as a short music career performing at numerous Melbourne and interstate venues, Pasquale has over many years continually developed from where he first began with VolARTile group exhibitions in the growing Geelong art community.
Creating raw paintings with bold monochromatic and layered compositions formed from a semi objective process that leaves dynamic yet naturally formed and personal monoliths, the artist draws inspiration from everyday objects and architecture. The heavy use of black contrasted against white is sometimes combined and blended with vivid colour pallets. (2015.)Exhibitions
Then Ambience Store Project No.2
There is nothing tentative about the work of Damien Pasquale. Using rugged but controlled brush strokes, Pasquale explores gestural movement and architectural structures in his layered compositions.
With a nod to luminaries Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov and particularly Franz Kline, his bold monochromatic paintings pay homage to the origins of abstract expressionism in that their essence is the spontaneous nature of their creation. These are works that celebrate the action painters of the past with their textural inconsistencies, brush movements and visible records of the artistic process, but also look towards contemporaries such as Pierre Soulages, whose mastery of black pigment is fundamental to his practice.
(2016)
Miami Marketta
Delivering vibrant collisions of abstract expressionism with bold architectural concepts, Pasquale draws you into a world where everyday objects inspire monochromic formations that burst from the seams with exploding texture, vivid colour and iridescence.
(2016)
Let’s All Skip Blindly into the Unknown
The world goes on, but not as we knew it.
We are all skipping (or staggering) blindly, into the great unknown.
In Damien Pasquale’s latest series of works, the artist explores the theme of heroes in our current world; heroes in the eyes of society and from the artists own perspective. Using subtle dichotomous narratives, the artist explores current events; dark versus light, reality versus conspiracy theory, the good, the bad and the ugly. In this new reality of COVID, opinions are strong and wildly divergent.
Who is on the side of right? Who are the ‘heroes’ ? Who are the ‘villains’?
Revival Art & Design’s brand new space at Albion Art Hub hosted this debut solo exhibition, completely transformed by this artist’s major work to date. Significant in size, impact and respectfully influenced by his own personal art hero, Franz Kline - Pasquale expresses himself through the use of bold, contrasting colours, heavy textural layers and large gestural brush stokes. Dark versus Light. Black versus vivid, high contrasting colour.
(2020)
il Piccolo Cowboy - An Ode to Heritage
In a rough, ready and raw release, a benign humour thinly floats around dark and distorted surfaces, bringing a richly layered dialogue that is deeply embedded in each artwork and can be readily found, but instead of exposed - meanings remain safely masked and hidden.
In a dichotomous language and relationship, the small decontextualised diptychs of Hollywoods great white ‘Western Cowboy’, embody an approach of contrasting methods with two distinctively processes of varying results; one is screen printing and the other painting - flat and textured.
(2021)
Scraping Existence (Coming Soon to Brisbane! 8-24 September, 2022)
Pasquale’s previous solo exhibition themes looked closely at exploring different ideological contexts of how society portrays and defines a ‘hero’ via his own visual language.
From comparing the artists own conflicting father and son cultural perspectives in ‘il Piccolo Cowboy: An ode to Heritage’ - 2021, and in the idolatry monoliths in ‘Let’s all Skip Blindly into the Unknown’ - 2020 greatly inspired by luminaries Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov and in particular Franz Kline a key figure of American Abstract Expressionism between 1950 and 1961.
Damien’s fun and clever selection of sentimental objects strategically placed alongside heavily textural based painting techniques, functions as yet another significant layer to enrich the audience’s gaze and interpretation, but more importantly to freely open up a conversation of inquiry and engagement into understanding the exhibition on whole.
Now Pasquale’s attention is caught and centred between another grand master artisan, Gerhard Richter with his distinctive squeegee technique, and a more modern contemporary Lev Khesin. The ‘squeegee’ is a tool used for screen printing. Damien’s previous employment history in the textile printing industry has a strong connectedness to this tool of trade.
From Pasquale’s current exhibition title, ‘Scraping Existence’ endeavours to expand further understanding on the concept of ‘Existentialism - a well known form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and centres on the subjective experience of thinking, feeling, and acting’, in a contemporary visual art practice today, speculates what exactly a true ‘artist’ is to endure.Website
Showing all 3 artworks
Damien Pasquale
Glen Strange (Last Stagecoach West)
38 x 61 x 3 cm Framed: 41 x 64 x 3.5 cm Oil and Mixed Media $890.00
Damien Pasquale
Rory Calhoun, The Texan
38 x 61 x 3 cm Framed: 41 x 63 x 3.5 cm Oil and Mixed Media $890.00