I find it hard to recollect the first object I ever really saw, but as the years go by I have re-created, artificially perhaps, my first memory of an object. It is one associated in my mind's eye with cartoons, with some sort of Disney-like story in which coloured forms serving no identified purpose hovered in an abstract space. This quasi-oneiric essence of an object (it might only have been a childish dream) lay idle for years, until eventually the life of that child - who had looked at the pictures in comics, too young to read them - led him to become involved in the design of objects themselves.By that time he was attempting to give a written, drawn or even three-dimensional interpretation of them, and perhaps also to re-create that early experience.

 And so it was that to encounter the paintings of Nathalie Du Pasquier, many years after I first met her, was like sliding slowly into another long dream. From that dream there gradually emerged, increasingly distinctly, the symbolic essence, the soul perhaps, of the things we create to help us live: not necessarily better, but in any case, to live. Not that objects of similar beauty had not previously appeared in the history of art. It goes without saying that prior to the shells, jars, books and flowers Du Pasquier set out in her paintings, other flowers, jars, books and shells had obliged other artists - at least ever since and even before the still life existed - to open their eyes to the world and give it the best interpretation they could. It is almost unseemly to mention them by name, as the expert observer need hardly be reminded. The less knowledgeable will have an opportunity here to watch a short history of modern art (from Caravaggio to Morandi, Magritte to Ozenfant) or simply to gasp at the way objects can describe themselves, their hypothetical owners or plain 'users' and even the artist who paints them.

 Biographically speaking, Du Pasquier is a 20th-century artist, or at least she was born and has her background in that century. Some will remember her decorative exploits for Memphis; she was the woman who helped to civilize that rather exaggeratedly male group's media appearances. They will remember the fabrics, the clocks and the furniture that she designed – with George Sowden or by herself – and that gave to the style of a period considered naive and even over optimistic (though in reality still quite unexplored) the touch of an amiably exotic imaginary world. The exoticism was probably mediated by certain periods spent in Africa, but certainly also by a keen interest in the diverse nature of things. It was this same interest that induced her, one fine day, to stop designing or, rather, to prefer the representation of things that already existed to the design of things to come.
Eventually she almost completely stopped producing new objects; she replaced them with a large number of paintings. After a short acrylic period, Du Pasquier switched to oil paint and has never left it since. The technique is different, of course, and so is the way of building up her narrative with images. The slower speed of execution, the necessity of waiting, but also the infinitely greater ductility of colour (and its duration) convinced the artist to start a kind of encyclopaedia of representation of all objects she came across. A curious occasion recently arose from her meeting with Leonard Koren, a writer, former journalist and founder of the magazine Wet. Having taken a fancy to the beauty of these works, Koren decided to use them as illustrations in his publication Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement.
This is, in reality, a completely different process to that of traditional illustration, for it is not the paintings that illustrate the text but exactly the opposite. From Koren's use and analysis of Du Pasquier's paintings stems a sort of intriguing universal theory of the image. When applied concretely to the example of these paintings, the rules for the 'rhetoric of object placement', the book's subtitle, which might not in itself sound all that exciting, produces unforeseeable effects. And the most striking is that of the perhaps involuntary, in fact corrosive irony with which Koren applies to them the category of fiction - This is more than an arrangement: this is a grand, epic event occurring in existential space and having to do, most likely, with the enigmatic relationship between two glasses' - or, to use the category of category of metaphor, 'Altogether the arrangement is consistent with the norms of "good taste" as propagated by interior design and shelter magazines geared to a somewhat cultured readership'. It is not difficult to recognize here the touch of someone familiar with the secret life of magazines, with the constant risk faced by their publishers and editors but also by their readers, of falling into the devices of rhetoric. But it is equally easy to realize that this connection between the writer and the artist is also basically just a pleasant chance encounter.

 Du Pasquier's images soon detach themselves from the written page; they immediately speak another, more universal language- not the rhetorical, but the poetic language of someone who has shaken off rhetoric and no longer needs to hide behind Utopian or demagogic pretexts, to depict reality just as it is: always much more richly evocative than art itself, the transformer of everything into something else; implacable even, in its unpredictable and real influence on life. Often through the very objects and actions that we all attempt, uselessly, to design.