Philippe PASQUA

Philippe Pasqua is a French contemporay artist.

Philippe Pasqua
Our image, our figures, our human destiny

Engaged with the end of the 20th century, Philippe Pasqua's work includes dozens of drawings, paintings and sculptures. How can it be How can it be synthesised? We will insist on the face - the human face - which is the major entry point for the French artist.

Throughout his career, Philippe Pasqua has sculpted animals, a giant turtle, jellyfish, a dinosaur, a large primitive shark, sea urchins, half a whale skeleton, not to mention skulls, a Last Supper, a deranged merry-go-round, a twenty-meter-high black tower... His "signature", his real passion, however, is the face. His "signature", his real passion, however, is the face: that of family members, friends, acquaintances whom he takes pleasure in portraying, or of a young girl with Down's syndrome, of models he has met, and also, less insistently, of himself.

For Philippe Pasqua, painting has this vocation: to inscribe in time the humanity through which we live, that which inhabits our daily lives, by drawing it out of anonymity. This is demonstrated by his very own way of treating the portrait: by isolating it, or even by often keeping only the head reduced to its outline on a canvas left in reserve, as if suspended in the space of the canvas, airborne, free from the rest of the body. This optical choice is the psychological and symbolic equivalent of a fixation on the existence of the other, on his presence, his "being-in-the-world", his destiny, for a shared moment.

Another striking fact is the distancing of the spectacular. It is not that the models Philippe Pasqua sketches express nothing, but their figures generally radiate in a low manner, with a preference on the part of the artist for meditative poses. To see each portrait that Philippe Pasqua draws or paints concretely elaborate says a lot about the very meaning that the artist assigns to his work. Pasqua refuses perfect mimicry. His work is a sum of trial and error, of advances and retreats, of repentances and recoveries, of erasures and resumptions that reveal a gradual appropriation, a desire to merge with the model. Life, in Philippe Pasqua's work, infuses. A powerful feeling of incarnation takes shape, in the wake of those masters who have remained beacons, Francisco Goya, Egon Schiele, Vincent Van Gogh, Graham Sutherland, Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon. 

Paul ARDENNE, French historian, art historian, curator and writer.