Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present Horizon Mural by Pascal Pinaud. Following his last solo show in 2012, and the group exhibition UPSA Dream which he curated in 2008, it is the artist’s fifth collaboration with the gallery.
"The paper works of Pascal Pinaud are a complex universe that throws up a number of questions pertaining to his production as a whole. However, even though the works that Pinaud refers to generically as drawings contribute - in the form of "tests" and "prototypes"- to the conception of large format works, they are no less a body of work that stands alone, like a corpus within a corpus, consisting of the exploration per se of the possibilities revealed as the work progresses. Since the winter of 1989-90, Pinaud has produced more than four hundred drawings in some twenty different series. Based on an open outlook, directed from the front, this approach combines consistency with improvisation that goes hand in hand with untrammelled and creative opportunism. "My work evolves with the circumstances that surround it", Pinaud emphasizes. "It takes its direction from its context, places, events and encounters. I am open to anything and nothing is excluded out of hand". In addition to the inventiveness that arises from this methodical eclecticism, it is possible to discern a continuing wish in the artist to avoid effects of style and other individual traits. Although his drawings are never preceded by preliminary studies, they nonetheless give rise to new production. Years after they have been executed, some of them inspire new series of works on paper or large paintings. However, Pinaud's fondness for long-term effects and latency in no way affects the manifestation in each of his works of a series of decisions, the sharpness and consistency of which transcend the common idea of deployment to suggest a set of experiences of confirmed unitary character. In spite of the modest size of their format, his drawings present themselves as completed realities with the power to embody particular situations and reveal - either through continuity or divergence - the conditions of possibility of works to come. In order to define the rules of unity, autonomy, interpretability and diversity that his production methods obey, Pascal Pinaud significantly makes reference to the notion of action. Employing links that exist between his practice and commonplace sensitivity, he evokes the virtues of the principle of reality. Pinaud shows himself to be like an empirical realist, working "in the spirit of abstraction", to quote an expression dear to his friend Noël Dolla. Even if his works are not completely abstract, the means Pinaud adopts and the configurations that he develops unconcernedly take up the heritage of the forms of abstraction of the past. On the other hand, the conception underlying the resulting drawings shows no special interest in the gifts usually acknowledged in those "who know how to draw", as, for Pinaud, the paths of referentiality have their origin in a completely different exchange with the visible.
Fabien Faure, an extract from "L'esprit de famille", to appear in Pascal Pinaud - Les dessins (Geneva: Éditions du Mamco, 2015)