After over a year of silence, the crowds are back. In airports, at stadium exits, in shopping malls. Crowds of expressions and bodies inflamed by the same emotion. Will life ever be normal again? Do we already yearn for silence? What forges the everyday experience of our dreams? What is the meaning of the word “enthusiasm”? What common desires drive us? What tramples on the feet of the crowds in which we find ourselves? What are we crushing? What is the state of our expectation? Of our despondency? We have many crowds gathered in our memories. The crowds of tortured bodies in concentration camps and jubilant crowds on Liberation Day. Crowds are multiple experiences of loneliness. They express the privilege and distress of existence, the pleasure and the pain. We are one and we are multiple. A crowd is always grieving, even over its next separation. We are deserted and we are part of a crowd; we are the silent voices of the age-old crowds in which we gather.

Today, Pascal Tassini’s statues are out in their crowds at the Trinkhall Museum; multiple examples of loneliness gazing at us in silence and most intimately refracting our modest, relentless transformations.

Pascal Tassini (Ans (B), 1955) spent time at the Créahm workshops for more than twenty years, from 1966 to 2018. He developed an extraordinarily rich polymorphous style – drawings, paintings, terra cotta sculptures and bunches of knotted material for which he is now famous, relentlessly cobbling together shapes, substances, existence. This is an example of constantly moving art, relatively indifferent of its results. Tassini is a forager and creates wonders out of fragments he finds here, there and everywhere, scattered amidst the chaos of the workshop – a combination of impatience and reliability in the ad libitum repetition of the same movements and traditions. Art is all-absorbing. You arrive in the morning, leave in the evening, and, so it continues; day after day, week after week, year after year. The key to happiness. Pascal Tassini is an expert in existence. Should he take up residence? Inside the workshop, we will build a hut where he can keep his belongings and accommodate his friends, or also accommodate his patients in the role of healer. Doctor Tassini is at the centre of a world that has slipped out of his hands. Should you get married? Yes, of course. Because love is the be-all and end-all of any fulfilled life. So, you’ll make wedding dresses, headdresses, tiaras, formal suits. You’ll put flowers in your buttonhole, you’ll wear splendid attire, write love letters, exchange rings. You will be the groom and you’ll go to the bride and, soon, you’ll be holding her hand and then kissing her. Existence is so sweet and separation so sad! But, fortunately, your friends are there, modelled out of clay. The crowd of friends, multiplied by the infinite gesture that creates them, the movement of fingers and the handprint left on the ground, giving them their movement, their life, their depth, their texture, their brightness, their story. They just need to be placed on the shelves in the hut or carefully arranged in drawers and boxes. The statues are mostly small in size. There are enough resources in the workshop to make them. Pascal Tassini’s Stics have taken up space there for years. But sometimes, the statues are enormous. So then, we will bake them in a purpose-built oven between the museum and the bandstand in the Parc d’Avroy. It will be a festive occasion, like in the past and the present, according to all traditions; a bonfire lit long before night time, a joyous installation without memory or restriction; tumbling flames and a glimpse of silhouettes. Life is so beautiful and art is so pointless! Pascal Tassini’s statues are both so similar and so different. They are constantly moving, advancing through the crowd and they carry us away most brilliantly from the condition of existence.