Pascal Pesez
Painting as a Journey
The gash is the hallmark of Pascal Pesez’s work. Whether by bringing language, the canvas or his own body into play, the artist produces ruptures that mask what they unveil in an ongoing relationship of tension and distension between background and form.
When space is cleft in two by his naked, curled-up and hanging body, Pesez reinterprets the uterine experience, drawing attention to weight in all its verticality. He posits that the weight of a body born into the world exists in the interval between heaven and earth. This founding act, bringing together the origin and the becoming of human beings, heralds what later would come to be the central issue in his painterly trajectory, guided by a quest to occupy this profoundly human interval. How indeed can one inscribe oneself into such a space, while dealing with the physical and organic presence of the body – the body that one has, that one is, of those that surround us and which, together, constitute the very substance of the world?
Centred on the massive density of a coloured – usually reddish – magma, the paintings from the late 1990s turn the space of the canvas into the framework for a sort of staged drama: that of a falling form. These Trophées (Trophies), welling up from within the paintings that they seem to have disembowelled, have all the presence of flayed flesh. They sunder themselves from the obscure depths in incandescent bulges whose very outlines demarcate the form of their appearance. This dark background is precisely the condition of their existence; it recedes to allow them to emerge, opening up only to unveil them, in a laceration of light.
Beginning in 2000, the effects of contrast between the background and the form tended to become blurred, as did the paintings’ composition in successive planes. With the Làçà (There-that) series, the masses shrivel and progressively move away from the centre only to spread over the entire surface of the painting. The purplish red areas continue to attest to the presence of a focal point, but do so like imprints just grazing the surface. The pictorial matter is grounded in nuances of pink and seems to have jettisoned much of its load. The swollen forms yield to the line, the marks and traces holding interpretation in its organic dimension at bay. The body is still there, but appears to be seen from further away, as if it were an extension of its surroundings. The dilution of forms and their absorption into the background causes space to expand and extends the outlines. The rose-coloured matter bubbles, circulates, encompasses, becoming an atmosphere. All that remains is the odd incision, placed at random, on the edge, off to the left, allowing the space to grow suggestive.
Since 2004, the canvases’ size has come to exceed that of the body. In the Délices (Delights) series, the format doubles and unfolds, as the colours proliferate and blend, and what had formerly been mere breaches become gaping chasms from which an uncontrollable agitation emerges. Verticality and centrality shift dramatically, drifting to the surrounding areas; the painting becomes cartographic, as drawing of the body and the body of the drawing are plunged into the paste of the matter. Presented in diptychs, the paintings interact with one another and the forms spread out in a back-and-forth movement, whose rhythm is determined by an axis of immaterial separation. The interval between the paintings marks a breathing spot as it furrows a narrow rift in which the forms are swallowed up only to gush forth further along. The trajectory of painting here is stimulated by a spacing that enables it to conquer in non-linear fashion an area that has now doubled in size. Each canvas opens onto an abyss in which the elements mix together in a baroque composition. Fabrics, water and fire, roads, prairies, mountains? Even the cloudy foam around the edges is dyed and just barely allows the density of its successive layers to be seen. The painting has taken. The fusion of the visible and the concealed has produced a battered relief, outlining an expanded territory that can be invested from every side. The gaze plunges, deprived of the distance necessary to evaluate and define what it sees, for now the image is diluted in touches of colour. Revealing and concealing create a deep pictorial landscape, where what is underneath exists to the same extent as that which is up above. The painting states its passages, which have been surveyed and are the object of multiple hesitations. Joining the line to tactility in an accumulation of movements, the gesture, in all of its amplitude, seems to haul the matter along, while at the same time admitting the unexpected.
In the drawings, the irregular lines, at times heavy, at times partially erased, allow their rings to be discovered as if they were testimony to their foundations and the different constitutive steps. They propose a sensitive circuit sketched out by broken lines and punctuated by lively touches. The trajectory here is uncertain and the dead-ends numerous, as if one were recreating from memory the paths and meanders of a rough and chequered journey. The stratification of the furrows brings to light the progressive formation of a personal geography in which the overflows and the breaks are as significant as the main lines. These different eras of drawing crystallise here in figures, thereby making their history legible.
Between folding over and folding open, the recent works give free rein to impalpable forms at the outer edges of the recognisable. Puncturing holes in the support gives leeway to a journey through the complex ramifications of a moving in-between, allowing us to perceive the vibrations of a reality still in the very throes of emergence.
Célia Charvet, April 2006.