CASA ARGENTAURUM
Andrea BRANZI
Garden 15.07.2017
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Portali 01.05.2016
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Open Enclosures 28.03.2008
Paris (FR) (icw Fondation Cartier, Paris [FR])
Silver & Gold 18.12.1999
Design museum Gent
L’Eta del bronzo 19.07.1999
Argentaurum Knokke
Silver & Wood 10.10.1997
Argentaurum Antwerpen
Amnesie 19.09.1992
Argentaurum Antwerpen
Ann DEMEULEMEESTER
Conrad WILLEMS
Modular Construct 30.01.2022
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Eline FACHÉ
A narrative motion 22.09.2016
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Ettore SOTTSASS
Metaphors 31.05.1997
Argentaurum Antwerpen
Griet VAN DE VELDE
Points in Time 14.04.2015
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Hans HOLLEIN
Simplexity 05.11.1994
Argentaurum Antwerpen
Honoré D’O
Opera Aperta 21.10.2012
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Isabel DEVOS
Contemplative Landscapes 12.11.2017
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Jean-Marie BYTTEBIER
Johan DESCHUYMER
Droomoord 09.01.2006
Argentaurum Knokke
Johanna GRAWUNDER
Trucks 01.04.1992
Milan [IT] & Argentaurum Antwerpen
Lieven LEFERE
Things Hidden 04.07.2021
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Liza FRANÇOIS
Sunflowers for Spring 28.03.2024
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Malou SWINNEN
Marie CLOQUET
Marthe COOLENS
Aesthetic of the divers 22.09.2016
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Matali CRASSET (icw Winston Spriet)
Transplant 23.03.2008
Argentaurum Knokke
Nathalie Du PASQUIER
HILLS and others 04.10.1997
Argentaurum Antwerpen
Patrick MERCKAERT
EAR SEA 01.04.2004
Argentaurum Knokke
Paul D’HAESE
WINKS OF TANGENCY 27.01.2019
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Perry ROBERTS
Here/There 01.01.2004
Argentaurum Knokke
Peter WATERSCHOOT
AT THE SKIN OF TIME 18.11.2018
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Rudi BOGAERTS
Blind spot observer 24.09.2015
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Spatie-Espace 24.09.2010
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Et le manual 21.06.2006
Argentaurum Knokke
Images volées 20.03.2005
Argentaurum Knokke
sabine oosterlynck
window of opportunities 08.05.2022
Casa Argentaurum Gent
STAND VAN ZAKEN (doorzon + Theo DE MEYER) & Stefanie DE VOS
ROMANTIC ACTIVITY 30.06.2020
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Trees DE MITS
Rood gekloond 03.02.2013
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Wim GOES Andrea BRANZI Ettore SOTTSASS
Permanent collection 04.12.2021
Casa Argentaurum Gent
Wim GOES & Willem COLE
COLLATERAL 07.07.2019
Casa Argentaurum Gent

Nathalie du Pasquier

 

I have known Nathalie for many years, since the early Eighties when she turned up in Milan. She arrived there in a more or less immigrant capacity; a penniless, perplexed and silent immigrant, her eyes almost without a glimmer of hope…; without even knowing where to settle. She had arrived—people said—after wandering through India; perhaps after running away from her safe and stylish home in Bordeaux, perhaps in search of an ‘essence’ for life—which for Nathalie certainly didn’t signify or boil down to a sense of security or, still less, to the elegant rituals of her respectable French family.

How she came to Milan I don’t know; I know she arrived carrying, in addition to her poverty and silences, and hidden behind her perplexities, a very special store of experiences, decisions, memories and possibilities; carefully packed and strapped. As happens occasionally when destiny is well tied up and packed… when destiny is sometimes only waiting to be unpacked and disclosed.

What Nathalie perhaps saw and found in India may have been the meaning of calm, the meaning of modesty and measure, the determination always to look, by and large, for the quintessence of things and to forget, not to bother, about the emptiness and mystification. Just as, it seems, the earliest Homo sapiens did when they broke open the femurs of deer to eat the marrow. It is almost never possible to get to the core of things by elbowing one’s way around. The pith will probably only be found in silence, after long meditation, after scraping off the appearances and discarding the squeezed logic, the over-lucid logic of plastic.

There is instead a softer, dusty kind of logic, as well as that of the unknown, the logic of progress and consumption; the large and the small… and there is a logic of noise, of silence, a logic of speed and a logic of perplexed immobility…

Nathalie on her travels has encountered and got to know all these diversities. Her existential wisdom grew and grew until it became, in fact, silence: a permanent silence, a question forever unanswered.

Nathalie thinks by now that the landscape of existence can only just be touched, gently caressed; that only little bits of it can be more or less stroked, here and there, like stroking a cat; just a little on its head, or only under its chin, or sometimes on its cheeks. In that way the cat is content and so is Nathalie. One can live for a while, for a while without looking for anything, but for a while knowing (something that isn’t even known), for a while letting everything continue…

Nathalie has been in Sicily too, looking at the landscapes there and gazing at days and skies, at the stones, walls and houses, a little bit at a time, watching events that have no reasonable reasons for being except for a brief fraction of time.

Events that don’t even bear any relation to each other. The houses-without-windows are as immobile as rocks, the trees are as big as rocks and the stones as still as houses. There is nobody there, nothing moving. The landscape is totally still, not even time moves in it. Everything is so motionless that not even the existence of time can be felt. Nobody knows where the past is. Or where the future is.

Perhaps this system of watching the world a little bit at a time, of stroking it a little at a time without in any way disturbing it or trying to find something that isn’t there, is the system used by angels to calculate where they are.

 

Ettore Sottsass
10 September 1997