PHILIPPE PASQUA

Flayed ? Their characters seem so. Aesthetics are of little importance to Philippe Pasqua. Expressiveness takes precedence: don't we say that "the eyes are the mirror of the soul"? His gesture, ample and strong, unleashes a certain violence. A power exacerbated by the monumental format of his paintings. The fillings are clumping together like blisters, perhaps evoking the scars of these social outcasts; blind, Down's syndrome, disabled, so many marginal "groups" that the artist honors.

Philippe Pasqua's artistic research is based on psychology. These men and women, or these men who have become women, are not simply staged. No, these subjects are followed throughout a period of their life. Thus, the artist becomes a kind of biographer, who tells in painting the physical or mental evolution of these characters.

Philippe Pasqua devotes an important place to his passion for skulls. Skulls that he collects like the thousands of brushes in his studio. Here again, the disproportion is sometimes appropriate. As with this skull, which weighs several tons, carved in Carrara marble in Italy. Philippe Pasqua is also meticulous with butterfly vanities which can have various fates: being covered with gold or silver leaf, buried under a wave of paint, or even immersed in a bath of chrome.

Sometimes a touch of black humor is perceived. What a curiosity this skull placed in the center of an ashtray! Allegory of the famous "Smoking kills"? Or is it the sad fate that awaits us? Born in Grasse in 1965, Philippe Pasqua is self-taught.