Packchwork
Monumental Assemblages,
Fragments of a Collective Memory
de Pascal di PÉRI
Where Mues captures the fleeting, poetic essence of crushed containers — reduced to their simplest expression — Packchwork extends that reflection through accumulation and recomposition. While Mues isolates the detail, Packchwork arranges it, multiplies it, and transforms it into an organic mosaic.
An organic mosaic
These large collages, born from the same raw material — aluminum cans, compressed boxes, remnants of everyday life — come together like pieces of an industrial puzzle. The title, a play on words between “patchwork” and “pack”, evokes both the handcrafted technique of assemblage and the popular reference to a “pack of beer” — an ironic nod to the overconsumption that fuels these works.
Each piece becomes a dialogue between destruction and reconstruction, between the individual and the collective. The once-anonymous fragments find a second life here, united by a geometry that is at once chaotic and controlled. Packchwork questions our relationship with waste, its value, and the ways in which art can transform the ordinary into a powerful visual narrative.
Through these assemblages, Pascal Di Péri questions the traces we leave behind, and the unexpected beauty that can emerge from what we discard.
Connection with “Mues”: Both collections share the same raw material — crushed aluminum — yet they explore opposite facets of it: Mues reveals its fragility and individuality, while Packchwork celebrates its collective strength and resilience. One is a meditation on the isolated object; the other, a celebration of accumulation and transformation.
Packchwork
The collage-assemblage of recycled matter as visual poetry
Like the Mues series — which invites consumerist matter into a poetic metamorphosis, asking “Do inanimate objects have a soul?” — the new collection Packchwork extends and expands Pascal di Péri’s artistic approach.
Aluminum cans — remnants of a mass-consumption gesture — are once again at the heart of the process. Crushed, cut, fragmented, recomposed, they shift from being the subjects of photography (as in Mues) to becoming the very material of collage.
The title Packchwork plays on words: patchwork (an assemblage of diverse fragments) meets pack (as in a pack of beer cans). This double meaning captures the essence of the work — a merging of waste and design, consumption and reconstruction.
Where Mues focused on metamorphosis — the transformation of discarded matter into image — Packchwork explores composition, the act of bringing fragments together into new wholes. Here, what was once photographed is now assembled, woven into vast visual tapestries. Each piece becomes a rhythmic surface where logos, colors, and dents merge into a new texture — a visual symphony born from industrial debris.
Mues speaks of the individual transformation of matter; Packchwork speaks of its collective recomposition. Together, they form a dialogue: from the introspective gaze of a single crushed can to the architectural energy of an entire surface built from hundreds.
The intent remains constant: to transform the residue of consumption into a source of reflection and beauty. To reveal that waste can be reborn as structure, that what is discarded can become lyrical.
In Packchwork, the “pack” becomes a motif, the can a pixel, the act of crushing a rhythmic gesture. Each collage vibrates with color and density, questioning our relationship with consumption, branding, and transformation.
What becomes of an object when it turns into texture?
What becomes of a logo when it dissolves into pattern?
What becomes of consumption when it looks at itself, fractured and reassembled, through the lens of art?
In this continuity between Mues and Packchwork, Pascal di Péri invites us to perceive the poetic pulse of recycled matter — an aesthetic of resilience where the humble can becomes a bearer of memory, rhythm, and rebirth.
— Pascal di Péri
