Pascale Robert

If some people have made the "art is life" slogan an artistic one referring to interpenetration and the merging of experiences, Pascale Robert, for her part, has chosen life as the inexhaustible source of a practice which is decidedly referenced and historical: to wit, painting. The culture of the party is associated with studio labour to produce a merry and knowing oeuvre. Faces askance, unlikely failed framings, outrageous attitudes and disappointing pauses... everything which is ordinarily forgotten or deleted in a split second in digital cameras here becomes the subject of an excessively precise attentiveness. And after hours of work, each piece becomes the witness of a fleeting instant. This contradiction between the beauty of the gesture and the thanklessness of the pose (which, it just so happens, is not a pose) forms the nub of Pascale Robert's praxis. As if there was in what eludes us, and in what reason does not manage to master, a form of truth whose obviousness only merits being revealed through the aptitude for drawing loose hairstyles, hair after hair. As if painting in oil these moments of festive roaming in the end of the day said more about things human than any other testimony.