Frittelli arte contemporanea is pleased to present the exhibition Pino Trademark. Opere grafiche di Pino Pascali [Graphic works by Pino Pascali] curated by Roberto Lacarbonara, an event marking fifty years since the death (11 September 1968) of one of the greatest Italian artists of the post World War II period.

“Pino Trademark” is the signature that Pascali put at the foot of a letter sent to the art dealer Gian Enzo Sperone in 1966, to thank him for the recently inaugurated exhibition in Turin, where for the first time the artist showed his Armi [Weapons] series in public.

A singular choice, rather ironic - almost a hallmark on his recent production - that immediately refers to the citation of those American “models” with which Pascali loved to compare himself, especially in the field of advertising research, carried out in those same years, for Lodolo Film and Rai. In the many drawings-tributes to Jasper Johns, in the set designs for the carousels of companies such as Algida or Steel USA, as well as in the choice of characters and stories, Pascali invented a highly original style and language, often with a gaze - sometimes critical and insidious - turned towards America and its hegemony in commerce and communication. The sketch Super (1965) - to which the recent volume Super. Pino Pascali e il sogno americano [Super. Pino Pascali and the American Dream] (Skira, 2018) - embodies his sarcastic vision towards the stars and stripes superpower, whose tools of rhetoric and visual culture the artist seems to know inside out.

On show will be many of the works produced by Pascali as part of his research into the moving image, created using drawing, collage, emulsions, tempera and mixed media, on paper or acetate, and intended for television production. Two of the most significant caroselli will also be on display: I Killers, a short animated film initially proposed to Algida and later, after the client's refusal, developed by Pascali into an autonomous video; and Cirio, a film made from a photographic reportage carried out by Pascali between Rome and Naples in which the artist interprets the Neapolitan masks of Pulcinella and Pazzariello.

The graphic sign that Pascali invented for Sperone thus reveals itself to be indissolubly linked to those subjects that he has long investigated - guns, killers, cowboys, the dollar, the metropolitan landscape and alphanumeric signs - which bear witness to his assiduous confrontation with New Dada and American Pop Art, but also to the invention of an all-Italian and Mediterranean way of advertising communication, manifesting at the same time his attempt to acquire and overcome overseas codes and linguistic formulas.