Philippe Pasqua Sculptures

Vanité Aux Papillons (Vanity With Butterflies) 2011 - Unique PHILIPPE PASQUA (B.1965) Vanité aux papillons stamped with the artist’s signature ‘Philippe Pasqua’ (on the base) polyester resin skull, acrylic and butter flies in a plexiglas box on a metal base 24 x 25 x 30 cm. (9½ x 9⅞ x 11. in.) with the base: 160 x 50 x 50 cm. (63 x 19⅝ x 19⅝ in.) Executed circa 2009, this work is unique. Philippe Pasqua is an important French contemporary artist. Through his extraordinary journey, Philippe Pasqua has emerged as one of the major artists of his generation. From the beginning, his art made a great impression and challenged the certainties of those who rubbed shoulders with him, like the great critic Pierre Restany. With Pasqua, the taste for the monumental goes hand in hand with an attraction towards what is most vulnerable – bodies and faces, sometimes with stigmatising differences that the artist adopts and magnifies through his painting: for example, portraits of transsexuals, people with Downs syndrome, or people who are blind. Handicaps, differences, obscenity or the sacred: each canvas is the fruit of a struggle, a tension between what can be shown and “tolerated”, and what is socially repressed or concealed. Pasqua’s painting strikes the visitor like an almost physical impact, but also like a vision that is at the same time explosive and incisive. The monumental format of the artist’s canvases is dictated by the breadth of his gestures — a dance where brutality and finesse, trance and lucidity alternate. He begins by painting the sort of fetishes or enigmatic silhouettes that evoke voodoo. Then, gradually, his gaze turns to those who are standing around him. He interferes with the twists and turns of people’s intimate depths, going right into the innermost areas of their being. As a counterpoint to this physical work, there are his grand drawings. The face or the body becomes a halo, mist, smoke, stroke, vibration. It is no longer so much a case of flesh as of sketched contours and delicate textures. There are also the “palimpsests” – works on paper mixing silk-painting techniques, printing and painting, where the painter goes back over his own work and adds patches of colour to them or redesigns them. Another major aspect of Pasqua’s work lies in his series of “vanities”. The technique employed evokes that of the silver- and goldsmiths of the Middle Ages working on a reliquary, and also some kind of shamanic ritual. He covers human skulls with gold or silver leaf. Sometimes, he covers them in skins and then tattoos them. Then there is the delicate stage where the skulls are decorated with preserved butterflies, with their outstretched wings and their iridescent colours: the light is refracted on their coloured, powdery surface, or falls into the deep shadows in the eye sockets. He also sometimes pours liquid paint in a thick stream that covers everything and submerges it. For several years, the artist has also been going to Carrara frequently, where he sculpts skulls weighing several tons that are like massive stars radiating telluric energy. At the foundry, he produces large bronze casts that are then plunged into baths of chrome. The skulls that emerge — human or animal, like that of the hippopotamus — become like mirrors: sometimes you only see their blinding reflection, sometimes they disappear, so that what they are reflecting emerges. And on approaching them, inevitably it is our own image that we see. Publications: Philippe Pasqua, Les miroirs de l’âme, Textes de Emmanuel Daydé et Cynthia Fleury, préface de Gérad Mathias, publié à l’occasion de l’exposition au Palais Bénédictine, Fécamp, 2002 Philippe Pasqua, Paradis blancs, Textes de Emmanuel Daydé et Michel Schouman, publié par la Galerie RX, Paris 2002 Philippe Pasqua, Numéro Spécial Beaux Arts Magazine, Textes de Eric Rodrigue, Julian Zugazagoitia, Pierre Restany, Erick Öge, Cynthia Fleury, Maïa de Martrin, Yann Fravalo-Riopelle, Michel Schouman, Kerstin Hengevoss-Durkop, Jean –Michel Ribettes, Harry Bellet, Caphi et Alain Renk, Édité par Jérôme Le Berre et Erick Öge, Beaux Arts, Paris, 2004 Philippe Pasqua, Textes de Michel Walberg, publié par La Différence « Mains et Merveilles » collection, Paris 2005 Philippe Pasqua, Textes de Judd Tully, publié à l’occasion de l’exposition de la galerie Patrick Painter, Santa Monica, California, 2006 Philippe Pasqua, Textes de Henri-François Debailleux, publié à l’occasion de l’exposition « Philippe Pasqua, Pulsion » à la Galerie RX et Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris 2007 Philippe Pasqua, Textes de Ulrich Krempel, publié à l’occasion de l’exposition Philippe Pasqua à Hanovre, Stiftung Pro Arte, 2010 Philippe Pasqua, Paradise, Textes de David Rosenberg, publié à l’occasion de l’exposition « Philippe Pasqua, Peintures et dessins » au MOMA, Moscou, évènement organisé à l’occasion de l’année France-Russie, Édition Skira, en partenariat avec la Galerie RX, 2010. En anglais et en russe. Philippe Pasqua, "Palimpseste" œuvres sur papier, Texte de David Rosenberg, édition galerie Laurent Strouk, 2010 Philippe Pasqua, girls skulls butterflies...