The publication “Opoyaz” by Pascal Schwaighofer is published on the occasion of the Manor Art Prize 2010 and shows works and room views from the solo exhibition in the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano.
Pascal Schwaighofer lives and works in Rotterdam and Mendrisio. He works with conceptual art, installation, sculpture and photography. Within the forms he creates – object constellations full of references to geography, natural history, archaeology and oriental cultures – he spreads an unstoppable entropy. The starting point of his work is the dialectical relationship between closed form and indeterminacy, between canon and transgression. The forms with which Schwaighofer intervenes artistically are in a state of progressive dissolution. In the process, the final form of the work slowly crystallizes or sometimes only takes on its final form during the duration of the exhibition. In this way, closed semantic organisms become dispositives of expanding and spreading independence, dispositives of corrosion and disarmament. In other works by Schwaighofer, on the other hand, the opposite direction can be found. The initially free disorder is brought back into a certain order and placed within the framework of a form that is formative but demanding.
The publication, designed by Sidi Vanetti and Sabrina Cerea, consists of four cleverly nested booklets in different formats. With exhibition views, photographs of works, reference illustrations and an introductory text by Elio Schenini, it oscillates between an artist’s book and a monographic publication and conveys a representative impression of Pascal Schwaighofer's current work.