Alessandro Casciaro

Commentators have often reached for scientific and cosmological metaphors when describing the art of Robert Pan. One need only think of the exhibition entitled Constellation at the Museion (2020). Indeed, his way of working brings to light memories of primordial times, the cosmic illumination of a sky that is only open to its own creation. Its abstraction is highly specific, it seems to belong neither to the paradigm of that abstraction which is called “lyrical” nor to the geometric. The resin dots appear like briefly shining points of light in the heavy impasto of the material from which they spring. It can be said that the polysemy in Robert Pan’s poetics, including the interlude of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square in the exhibition Geometrie dell’infinito (Geometry of the Infinite), is one of the cornerstones of his strength. Indeed, in the context of what Umberto Eco has called the “epistemological metaphor” of art, several possibilities open up for the interpretation of these works, which possess not only their own chromatic vibration, but also the strength of a presence that affects the whole environment in which they can be seen. Which is why Pan’s works often need plenty of space with nothing or almost nothing around them. They have an effect on their surroundings even if they remain works of art on the wall; they have a magnetic force that focuses the gaze and the mental attention which are the preconditions of an artistic expressiveness that has always succeeded in harmonising painting and sculpture.

Robert Pan was born in Bolzano in 1969. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, in the Sculpture Department, in Urbino (I) from 1987 to 1991. After his academic studies, from 1991 to 1992, he went to Paris to further his studies. The year after, he moved to London. In 1993, thanks to a scholarship, Robert Pan moves to New York (USA) and stayed there until 1995. He worked between Miami (USA) and Frankfurt (D) throughout 2013 and decided to set down in Miami (USA) only in 2014. He currently lives and works in Bolzano.

The Alessandro Casciaro Art Gallery (Bolzano, Venice) is an international, art gallery presenting modern and contemporary masterpieces by some of the most significant Italian as well as central European artists, selected for the quality of their quest and the uniqueness of their pictorial language, alongside works by emerging young artists, promoting them and developing their international profile. Founded in Bolzano in 2015 by Alessandro Casciaro as a successor to the Goethe Gallery, the first art gallery in South Tyrol (founded in 1964 by Ennio Casciaro), the Alessandro Casciaro Art Gallery can now look back on more than sixty years of important exhibitions, independently curated catalogues, collaborations and arts fairs, with the aim of providing varied and intense stimuli and objectives for the future of contemporary art in both Italy and Europe.