Skinned alive? His characters look like it. Aestheticism is not important for Philippe Pasqua. Expressiveness prevails: do not we say that "the eyes are the mirror of the soul"? His gesture, ample and strong, releases a certain violence. A power exacerbated by the monumental format of his paintings. Impastos agglutinate like swellings, perhaps evoking the stigmata of these outcasts of society; blind, trisomic, disabled, as many "groups" on the margins as the artist puts in the spotlight.
Philippe Pasqua's artistic research draws on psychology. These men and women, or these men who have become women, are not portrayed and that's all. No, these topics are followed throughout a period of their life. Then, the artist becomes a kind of biographer, who tells in painting the physical or psychic evolution of these characters.
Philippe Pasqua devotes an important place to his passion for skulls. Skulls he collects like the thousands of brushes at his workshop. Here again, disproportion is sometimes appropriate. As with this skull, which weighs several tons, carved in Carrara marble in Italy. Philippe Pasqua is also meticulous with vanities to butterflies that can suffer several fates: covered with gold or silver leaves, buried under a wave of paint, or immersed in a bath of chromium.
A touch of black humor is sometimes sprinkled. What a curiosity this skull placed in the center of an ashtray! Allegory of the famous "Smoking kills"? Or is it the sad fate reserved for us? Born in Grasse in 1965, Philippe Pasqua is an autodidact.
