Nathalie Du Pasquier

L'Almanach 18 : Nathalie du Pasquier

A famous designer and co-founder of the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, Nathalie Du Pasquier accompanied the (post)modern adventure around designer Ettore Sottsass, with the creation of objects, fabrics, carpets, and furniture. In 1986, she started devoting herself exclusively to two- and three-dimensional painting.
Memphis’s radicalism and formal inventiveness measured solely in terms of a scathing and iconoclastic postmodernism erased a little too quickly the adventure’s modern foundations. Nathalie Du Pasquier’s paintings are a perfect revelation of these connections: axonometric compositions applied to painting, the palette of muffled colors, objects, when they are present in the compositions, wink at the purism of a Corbusier or an Ozenfant. Mixed with memories and assimilations arising from the most tridimensional Suprematism–the architectones–some paintings and constructions also give prominence to this history of art and the applied arts.
Her website (www.nathaliedupasquier.com) features beautiful photos of the artist working on an easel painting of an abstract architectonic composition based on a three-dimensional source model, as though the sculpture had to also be shown in painting in a back-and-forth play that exhibitions are also able to present.
For the Camden Arts Centre in London, the modern narrative of construction contrasted with composition unfolded from large boxes painted with abstract and architectural forms and motifs, which brilliantly played with a mixture of modern/postmodern pop design, pure painting and applied arts, decorative volume and axonometric projections in the Giotto style. Italy is indeed this place conserving quattrocento memories reworked by the fine moustaches and slicked-back hair futurisms and stylishness in rational houses, which sometimes flirted with the unacceptable margins of brown and red fascisms.
At Le Consortium, for L’Almanach 18, Nathalie Du Pasquier will restage her painted and constructed narration for the fine room opening onto the courtyard: three walls painted with architectural and decorative forms resting on a skirting board painted in green will accommodate a long shelf carrying a group of three-dimensional polychrome constructions.
—Franck Gautherot