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.
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