Constance

The French artist Philippe Pasqua (born in Grasse in 1965) has emerged as one of the major artists of his generation. His preference for monumental artworks goes hand in hand with his attraction towards the most vulnerable – bodies and faces, sometimes with stigmatizing differences which the artist adopts and magnifies through his painting. He mostly paints portraits of transsexuals, people with Down’s syndrome, or blind people for instance. Handicaps, differences, obscenity or the sacred: each canvas or artwork by Pasqua is the fruit of a struggle, a tension between what can be shown and “tolerated”, and what is socially repressed or concealed.

Pasqua’s large faces, women or skulls are like landscapes filling the viewer’s line of sight without identifiable backgrounds or settings. Who you see or where they are, any signification to ground the images in a familiar space is absent. Whatever relationship the artist has with his subjects, is not of focus here. The viewer needs to make his own conclusions and interpratations. Pasqua presents his vision in a frenzy of brush strokes. The surface of the painting has become the subject and focus of his work. The painterly strokes aggravate the canvas or paper, almost brutally rendering the image, while his color choices, bloody reds and bruised blues create an vibrancy to the composition, because you actually see and feel the artist’s action of creating and painting.