What is the soul of a plastic bottle of Vinavil glue? In spite of our possible sympathies for the beliefs and practices of animism, we may just have to admit that it doesn't have one. And yet the very fact that we have been prompted to ask the question means that the objects painted by Nathalie Du Pasquier do not only belong to the world of objectivity. They are charged with subjective, probably sentimental content, the purposeful impulses of the gaze: the objects may not have a soul, but they are certainly not the protagonists of a mail-order catalog (which, instead, would be the essence of pure Pop...).
After all, every "still life" - because this work too belongs to that noble genre - brings with it a series of questions of interpretation, for which the objects depicted are simultaneously the mirror and the metaphor. It might seem like a paradox but no object, right from the very first occidental still life, is what it is. Everything represents something else, it is the signifier of a hidden significance, a metaphor and, more often, a symbol.
Each object is a reminder of another, in keeping with a code so precise that it is universally recognized: allegories of life, vanitas of ulterior existences foretold, visible symbols of an invisible reality are the soil in which the still life, the representation of objects grows.
But today we are seeing a strange phenomenon: precisely when each artwork makes reference to a complex linguistic context, often extraneous to the work itself, the object in art - whether it is painted, photographed or physically present - inverts the situation and demands consideration in its own right, eliminating any symbolic overtones, latching onto all the psychological or merely sentimental reverberations it knows it can call forth. In other words, the object retransforms itself, instead of a symbol it goes back to being just an object, in pursuit of a contact with reality never attempted by classical still lifes, while also avoiding that temptation of absolute form that was sought in objects by Cezanne and Morandi alike.

 Between these two extremes - the object-symbol and the object-object - lies a great wealth of possible variations, and it seems to me that Nathalie Du Pasquier has decided to treat objects with that same colloquial nonchalance with which we use them. This creates a sense of a sort of domestic awe in the face of things, which we can no longer define as metaphysical, nor as Pop. Here the metaphysical sense of things is rejected for its sense of alienation, dislocation, the substantially stately narrative scenario. In the same way, the Pop sense is rejected for the immanence of the object, its heavy, exclusive presence, although in practice all we see in the paintings are objects, isolated, "off-scale", gigantic, out of context, almost positioned in "limbo", in a photographic backdrop that penetrates infinity, and makes them look as if they are resting on a void. What keeps these objects from taking on that conceptual weight that so often turns into mere heaviness? The fact that they are painted, and painted with that apparent ingenuousness that errs - but only slightly - in the definition of perspectives, defining impossible shadows, showing the tracings of the brush in the definition of the contours, overlooking certain details, but without ever transforming a salt shaker into a cylinder, i.e. into a "form". The salt shaker is a salt shaker, the stapler doesn't become a totem of mechanics, just as the beer bottle doesn't become the ideological manifesto of some current of Dutch Pop... Yet our eyes cannot help but gaze at these objects (and not only because of the size of the canvases): these groups of objects contain a sort of chaste sentimental transport that doesn't emphasize their meaning, but nevertheless lets us know that they belong to a personal landscape, a familiarity that makes them mute interlocutors of our gestures ("our" gestures, because Nathalie Du Pasquier manages to communicate this sensation by means of empathy, thanks to the disarming technique of her painting and the disarming appearance of the painted objects).

 In this way the painted object becomes the "portrait" of that object: it is given a uniqueness that is not intended as a paradigm of anything - like the portrait of an old aunt, found up in the attic: no public grandeur, but the echo of a sentiment - that, nevertheless, bears witness to an existence, which is something less than an essence, and something more, much more, than an object.