Philippe Pasqua



Philipine 2010

Philippe Pasqua was born in 1965 in Grasse, France and began painting at the age of 18. He is a contemporary self-taught painter and sculptor, based in Paris painting huge scale pieces on canvas of nudes and portraits of adults and children that he has known for a long time, or only just met. His sculptures are created from materials such as human skulls and dried butterflies. All of his works seem to highlight the ugliness or the pain behind a person. He has an incredible distinct technique with his medium of oil paint, applying layer upon layer of unrealistic colour, pasting on frantic brush strokes of harsh colour and building up intense shadows. In fact, he concentrates so closely on the face to the point of the exclusion of detail, which immediately cuts you. This style goes hand in hand with his selection of subjects, painting disabled individuals, the blind, down's syndrome sufferers, and transsexual candidates. Pasqua clearly captures what is most vulnerable on his canvas, magnifying obscenity and a struggle. He paints the tension between what can be shown and what can be 'tolerated'. Perhaps to show what is socially repressed or concealed. He wants to disturb and shock the viewer, and through the use of representing the human figure with the intensity of colour and expressionism, that is exactly what he has done. We can feel the tension. The mood, the emotion and the suffering.  The damage done. And the pieces are so large that they can't possibly be ignored, which only accentuates the agony.  Because when I look at the portrait of 'Philipine', I feel vulnerable. I can almost feel the pain spilling from the darkness of her eyes and I almost believe it is my fault. Her eyes look down on me unforgivably  but powerlessly. The blue and and the red contrast so harshly suggesting her sadness and her torment, where as the red dragged and splattered against the coldness of the blue makes the portrait excruciating. It hurts. It is so sharp and emotionally intense that it physically hurts, almost, because the slicing brush strokes are dancing with raw brutality, wounding the viewer.

Pasqua in his studio, Paris.