It was early November, maybe end of October. The day was coming, slowly, a grayish glimmer let see the big park cedar trees’ black silhouette. A shroud of thick mist was covering these known landscape, but we did distinguish only with difficulties what constituted it. On damp dawn, icy, castle’s shapes were disappearing according to mist’s density changes. Even familiar noises were absorbing by cloud cover and were lost in space. Distances were vanished as much as points of view were abolished.
The light herself seemed to be susceptible to fall at any time, and universe to perish in permanent silence. Why did I think at this moment of Pascale Rémita’s paintings? Was it because atmosphere was empty of any soul? Was it because marks were fading away, making horizon invisible and the castle’s weight imperceptible? Was it because in this light not completely white yet but already shrouded, an odd stillness numbed perception?
Perhaps it is all those elements that seemed to me to possess something to do with Pascale Rémita’s painting. This day, light did not assert, castle did remain hidden in pallid light but desire to show her pieces has been stronger. That’s why I called her and I asked her all of sudden to set up a one shot* exhibition, in what appeared clearly to me as the perfect place, space and time’s accordance. This concurrence could establish a choice where it will be about paintings, images and some contemporary preoccupations. It was perilous. She agreed and comprehended project’s intensity.
Her paintings depict devoid, abrupt worlds. It draws up a ghostly map of dangerous lands, it evokes survival architectures or mysterious arrangements at the edge of the world, between ruins and bunkers. It shows impassable mountains, traps of sometimes deadly conquests, but dealing irrepressible fascination. It points inactive expanses or frozen surfaces. Her paintings, like her images, are restrained, cold, without matter’s effects but with many intangible shades.
We know Inuit have a vocabulary with 200 words to describe snow and ice colors’ endless variations. It is in these ability to leave her tones on canvas that Pascale Rémita reaches to catch the glance, because far from pompous display, her paintings show only few textures which strentghten its presence. Looking closer, colors’ handling, beyond skill, reveal a rare ability to translate on canvas the reported world, a binary world, liquid/solid, horizontal/vertical, flat/raised, shiny/ temperate, silent/vibrating, a world that is both threatening and attractive.
In the exhibition’s path, a tale appears where screenshots, satellite pictures offer to see, to perceive a world of technical echoes in which painting establishes itself and builds its own story. There is nothing obvious in painting this world, but the main feature of Pascale Rémita’s work takes also place in her technique to use matter. And as other still unknown artists who knew how to depicted Troyes events, in the Renaissance’s gallery, Pascale Rémita is aware to show-and tell- in her painting the disembodied world we are living in.
Her pictural metaphors-that so well expresses masked looks of her Observateurs, close to Les corps en morceaux created by Daniel Spoerri- portray with rare agility and cold lucidity a world from which arises a pending fear, but also a world where the shroud’s tear will let penetrate another luminous vision.
So this day, diurnal light never sets totally, but Pascale Rémita took the challenge. I thank her, because her pieces bring today in cold castle’s spaces those sensitive and relevance radiances that only art can provide.
Paul-Hervé Parsy, the 26th décember of 2012
FOOTNOTE
* expression literally meaning that we only have one chance