Philippe Pasqua

For more than 20 years, the French contemporary artist Philippe Pasqua has been concentrating on the human body, head, face, and skull, filling his monumentally scaled paintings with loosely rendered, expressive brushstrokes that seem to make flesh and bone come alive. These subjects also appear in his drawings and his layered, mixed-media works on paper. Pasqua’s compositions are unflinching and visceral, featuring odd, often unflattering angles, thick, textured surfaces, and close-up views of his subjects, which sometimes include transsexuals and people with mental and physical disabilities. In his dense, carefully formed sculptures, he concentrates primarily on skulls, often augmenting them with a patina of gold or silver or with butterfly wings. Pasqua assembles these intense visions at his studio-cum-exhibition space, the Storage, where viewers can intimately experience the grotesqueness, beauty, and fragility of his rendered human flesh.