Philippe Pasqua

Philippe Pasqua began painting at the age of 18, and explores various techniques in his work, primarily painting, drawing and more recently, sculpture.

Pasqua’s work strikes the visitor with 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 grand drawings and canvases is dictated by the breadth of his gestures — a dance where brutality and finesse, trance and lucidity alternate.

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 or people who are blind. The work represents this tension or struggle between the conventional and the repressed or concealed.

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. These “palimpsests” (works on paper) mix silk-painting techniques, printing and painting, where the painter goes 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 “vanités”. 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 or sometimes in skins and then tattoos them. Then 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.

Recently Philippe Pasqua has become interested in cars, which he transforms. Taking the Ferrari F450, which was completely covered in leather, tattooed and then fixed to the wall, just as a table or wall sculpture. In this work Pasqua converts a machine into a desirable body. He plays with the themes of speed and immobility, and contrasts the mechanical and organic as well as danger and sensuality.

In 2010, Pasqua designed The Storage, a display and storage space, a workshop and a place for museum exhibitions, a sculpture garden: a space dedicated to artistic experimentation and to developing thoughts and ideas.

Through his extraordinary journey, Philippe Pasqua has emerged as one of the major artists of his generation and exhibits worldwide.