French sculptor: Philippe Pasqua

From 7 June to 4 July 2010, a retrospective at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, a film, a book… and a new exhibition venue Russia will be honoring French sculptor and painter Philippe Pasqua at an important exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) For the occasion, art critic David Rosenberg, curator and publisher, will be showing some forty paintings, some ten drawings, and several sculptures made by Philippe Pasqua over the past decade. He is also publishing a monograph on the artist under the Skira label. Using monumental canvasses, Pasqua depicts inscrutable faces and bodies stripped to their essence. Pasqua gets under your skin “like breathing, like acting instinctively, like digesting, like an orgasm, that is, he applies the qualities of spontaneous liberation and free expression to painting, he characterizes the organic and essential functions of the human body, those which are the most independent of the brain’s direct control; breathing, digestion, and orgasm”, commented Pierre Restany a few years ago. In a movement of rebellion or abandon, his subjects offer themselves unceremoniously to the viewers gaze with raw realism and no tolerance for modesty or complicity. But while the flesh is not tender in his painting, Pasqua’s gaze on his models, full of humanity, touches the soul. (pasqua)