ART-PRESENTATION: Philippe Pasqua-Borderline
Philippe Pasqua employs different techniques in his work, mainly painting, drawing and most recently sculpture. A self-taught artist, Pasqua sets himself apart from the crowd with his singular figurative painting. In 2010, he set up “The Storage”, a space dedicated to both individual and group artistic experimentation. Comparable to a laboratory or museum, “The Storage” is a place in which ideas are developed, leading to artistic creation to be shown and exhibited, all on the same premises.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Oceanographic Museum of Monaco Archive
Philippe Pasqua in his solo exhibition “Borderline” at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco presents 12 artworks, including 7 unseen works that occupy the entire space, from the square in the front of the Museum and its panoramic terrace, to the cliff on which the building is perched, creating a dialogue with the Museum’s Collection. In his work Philippe Pasqua experiments with the notion of limits. He flirts with the brink, brushes against boundaries and breaks free of them. Violent and raw, his oeuvre disturbs as much as it fascinates, placing the visitor in a dilemma : to gaze intently or to turn away, a mechanism of defence rather than one of indifference. “My artworks flirt with the limits of life and are imbued with the theme of death. For “Santa Muerte” I treated the tortoise like a goddess, a pure, light and peaceful being, as shown by the lustre and smoothness of the material. In contrast to this is a net, a banal plastic object, one that illustrates the violence with which Man infringes upon the tranquility of this quasi-divine being”. Upon arrival, the visitor is immediately challenged by “Face Off”, a monumental bronze sculpture depicts a young woman leaning on her forearms. The skinned half of her face reveals a skull, a vanity, the allegoric figure of death. An approach to remind us that the human condition is fragile and that Death is always lurking behind the face of Life. The skull illustrates the remnants of humans after death while the butterflies symbolize lightness, the immaterial flame of the departing soul. The work is part of the tradition of the vanities, a major component of the history of art defined as the allegoric figure of death, of the passage of time, of the fragility of life in contrast with the emptiness of human occupations. The “Mirror Effect” is inspired by the jaw of the shark’s ancestor, the Megalodon, Philippe Pasqua creates a huge 4-by-4-metre mirror that reflects our image or worse, upstages us as we discover how actually small we are, inside the mirror, as if the animal had sucked us in and swallowed us. In the Salon d’Honneur, “Wheel Of Time” impresses the visitor weighing 7 tons, with a diameter of 7 meters and a height of 6 meters. The wheel does not spin and we need to walk around it to discover its complexity, its multiple components” Tyrannosaurus Rex carcasses, rats, an electric chair, a parasol, a century-old tree… and the materials that compose it – bronze, steel, aluminium, and even lace. The wheel does not turn and time seems to have stopped, everything frozen on the move or in position, mixing and overlapping periods, from prehistoric times to our contemporary period. On the 1st floor Philippe Pasqua initiates a conversation with the Museum’s Collection, by placing them in relation with his artworks created for the occasion. He begins this dialogue with a diptych composed of the only paintings in the exhibition, “Philippine” and “Vanessa”. On his canvases, skin appears rough, granular. By virtue of its excessive presence, it becomes transparent. In the Oceanomania Room, Philippe Pasqua presents “Golgotha”. The inspiration for this work was a 3000-year olive tree, reduced to a twisted trunk, dead, huge and a magnificent sculpture in its own right. After casting it in bronze, Philippe Pasqua added lush dark foliage before embedding the work in concrete, as if planted in the soil. Mesmerized by the huge carcass of the whale (18-metres-long) hanging from the ceiling in the Oceanographic Museum, Philippe Pasqua presents “Narcissus”. Given the material impossibility in being able to work directly from the animal, the artist decide to reproduce it identically, based on the remarkable skeleton of a whale from the collection of the Musée des Confluences in Lyon. The work was then hung upside down underneath the skeleton, creating the illusion that it is its reflection. “Santa Muerte” is a gigantic bronze tortoise trapped in fishing net, as through crucified under this shroud, with its plastic buoys, and evokes the tragedy of these endangered marine animals.
Info: Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, Avenue Saint-Martin, Monaco, Duration: 5/5-30/9/17, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00 (June & September), 9:30-20:00 (July & August), www.oceano.mc
