Nathalie Du Pasquier

“Between the outside and the inside, between the external and the internal edge-line, the framer and the framed, the figure and the ground, form and content, signifier and signified.... ”

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting

In her youth, Nathalie Du Pasquier once imagined becoming a sign painter—a “peintre en lettres” as she put it—working outdoors, carefully rendering the lettering on storefronts or the sides of cars. Du Pasquier has long gravitated toward places where painting intersects with the built environment, from the signs on the storefronts of Port Gentil, Gabon—where she lived for a year at the age of eighteen—to the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, which she visited as a child. In her 2015 essay “My Influences,” Du Pasquier enumerates the chain of people, places, and things that have impacted her aesthetic sensibility over the course of her career as if arranging objects for a still life: “Persian miniatures, Ingres, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Indian temples, Sanchez Cotán, Sottsass, El Lissitzky, Morandi, Giorgio de Chirico and Savinio, French Medieval miniatures, Le Corbusier, the shape of flowers, the colours of exotic fishes, the beauty of animal life, Japanese prints, the albums of Tintin et Milou. Plus,” she hastens to add, “many more things.”

This rich tapestry of disparate influences is woven throughout Du Pasquier’s paintings of the past decade, which have gradually evolved from figurative still-life compositions toward pure abstractions. Since 2016, her paintings no longer depict real objects, instead revealing the imagined spaces and relations between things. Pace Gallery’s online exhibition Nathalie Du Pasquier: Spaces Between Things, on view from June 2 through June 16, 2020, brings together more than a dozen works to trace this evolution in her practice. Two concurrent presentations—the online exhibition (opens in a new window) Message From My Room, consisting of a suite of new drawings with Anton Kern Gallery and, and Constellation, an installation for (opens in a new window) Apalazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy—offer the opportunity to consider the centrality of painting to Du Pasquier’s multifaceted practice, in which both architecture and drawing also play important roles.

In the 2000s, Du Pasquier began building three-dimensional wood constructions and using them as models for her compositions. A white little construction with 3 colorful pieces (2012) is typical of these works, which eventually lead the artist toward a new language of abstraction. Appearing to be non-objective, the painting is actually a portrait of a sculptural assemblage that Du Pasquier built in her studio from painted wood elements. That same year, she completed a series of drawings in colored pencil in which, for the first time, she liberated her forms from physical models, creating images directly from her imagination. “Those drawings were the things that pushed me in the direction [of abstract painting],” she explains, “all of a sudden I understood that I didn’t need to do all these models. That I could just go straight onto the paper or canvas.” Untitled (2012) belongs to this group of key works. Inventing form on paper allowed the artist to create geometries “that would never stand” in real life, since, as she puts it, “I’m not so good at building things.”

The dysfunctionality of form is central to Du Pasquier’s “cabin” works, which she has created over the past twenty years, and the latest of which is the subject of her concurrent exhibition at Apalazzo in Brescia, along with a group of new abstract paintings on canvas. The work expands on an idea begun in 2017, when Du Pasquier was asked to show drawings from the 1980s. Reticent at first to exhibit older work, she eventually created Dentro ieri fuori oggi (“Inside yesterday outside today”) (2017), a freestanding architectural pavilion or “cabin,” inside of which she pasted xeroxed images of her design works from the Memphis days. Du Pasquier’s cabin offered a kind of self-retrospective in a microcosm. It was a sculptural environment whose interior contained her history, and whose architectural skin was a new abstract painting. As Du Pasquier put it, the cabin was “to contain inside something from my past and outside, to be exactly what I am now.”

This kinship between painting and architecture in Du Pasquier’s practice goes back to her earliest painting, Viva Pertini (1985), a mural she produced for Denmark’s Louisiana Museum on the occasion of the group exhibition Homo Decorans. Du Pasquier was invited to participate together with the designer George Sowden, her collaborator and romantic partner, who introduced her to Sottsass and the Memphis movement in 1981. Among several other artists in the show, the museum had also invited Keith Haring to create a mural at the entrance of the exhibition. “On the other side of the entrance there was this empty space,” Du Pasquier recalls, “and after a few days I was there and doing what I was doing for the show and they asked: Why don’t you do a painting on the other side? I had never done it, I wasn’t a painter after all, but it was great! So I had this big surface. I went to the color shop. We bought some colors, and I did this painting, which is full of the decorated surfaces that I was using for textiles and carpets.” Du Pasquier’s first painting therefore emerges by way of the built environment—a mural is, after all, a painting on a wall and “very much linked with the architecture, with the space.”

“Whenever and wherever she exhibits, [Du Pasquier] smells the space and transforms it into a natural setting to host her creatures,” observes curator Luca Lo Pinto. Indeed, there is no such thing as a neutral presentation of her work. When she installs an exhibition, she places her paintings in space as if they were themselves elements in a still life. This was a particular feature of The Strange Order of Things, her recent 2019-2020 exhibition with Pace Gallery in Geneva and Seoul, in which the artist describes having “built the exhibition out of the elements which were the paintings.” The same will be true of her installation for Apalazzo, a gallery which inhabits the ground floor of the seventeenth-century Palazzo Cigola Fenaroli, one of Brescia’s oldest residences. Du Pasquier will also hang a series of small works around the cabin—which is both a support a three-dimensional painting in its own right—thereby constructing a kind of nested gallery-within-a-gallery, which is of course another kind of frame-within-a-frame. Still life, in this sense, remains the essence of Du Pasquier’s approach to creating environments: each painting becomes an object within the larger arrangement.

As a painter who renders the dazzling complexity of simple things, Du Pasquier’s work coaxes out enchantment from forms hiding in plain sight around us. She uses abstraction to invent maps for expanding the possibilities of our seeing. “In the end, installing things and representing them, this is what I want to do,” Du Pasquier concludes, “to create a kind of a scene that doesn’t tell a story. That is silent. In Italian we call them silent life.” She prefers De Chirico’s term vita silente to the more common natura morte because there is nothing dead about her works, she explains; instead, they express the vitality of lived experience. To enter Du Pasquier’s vision is to participate in this vitality, to attend to the “silent lives” around us—to the whispers of seemingly inert and humble forms—because, as the artist reminds us, “painting says something even though it is silent.”