Nathalie du Pasquier was born in Bordeaux in 1957, two years after the death of Fernand Leger. Jean Helion was to live until 1987, the year in which painting became her sole professional activity. Balthus is still working to-day, but the question "What happened to the tradition of French painting?" does not find a ready answer. Part of that answer is to be found in Milan in the work of Nathalie du Pasquier.

 To define or even to discuss what might be the national characteristics of painting would be out of place here, but somewhere between the romanticism and expressionism of Northern Europe and the gargantuan original lism of the USA one could look for the rational hedonism or analytical passion which has been a quality of French painting. What is meant by this is the clarity of vision expressed through linear drawing , and the ability to build forms rather than create an ambience, both of which are dominant elements in Nathalie du Pasquier's work. It is this aspect of her art, rather than "la belle peinture" of the School of Paris, which positions her in French culture. Not that she is without a natural touch and instinctive colour sense, but a caution about too much facility has led her to suppress rather than accentuate those abilities. The painter's eye has taken precedence over the hand, at least for the present.

 Still Life, the representation of an object or a collection of objects, is at the core of the art of painting. Other arguments might present the human face or figure, or the representation of space as central, but the recurring attraction of Still Life for the painter lies in the absence of distractions from the painting itself. There is, of course, in Still Life painting, a long tradition of allegory and symbolism, of "Memento Mori" and "Vanitas" pictures. But in the current work of Nathalie du Pasquier these elements are not to be the fore. They are not entirely absent, but the literary evocative meanings which may be attached to her objects are generalised allusions to physical experience rather than pointed references. There are allusions to opening and shutting, cutting and binding, fullness, emptiness, contiguity. There is never any question of surrealism or arbitrary whimsy in the choice of objects in a painting. What then could be the motivation in deciding to paint a particular still life ?

 This brings us back to the analytical urge in French painting which is to be found in varying forms from Nicolas Poussin, through Jacques Louis David to Fernand Leger. This analysis is not intellectual but visual. It concerns itself with the reality of seeing : the act of looking at an object; of representing it on canvas through the convention of drawing and painting ; of looking in turn at that representation. The painter, through his techniques and skills, makes something visible. We, the spectators, do not understand more about the objects represented, nor even more about the process of painting. But we SEE. We see something which exists on the canvas, but which is distinct from the materials of painting as it is from the original motif taken from the real world. Most painters of still lifes have a repertoire of objects from which they select. For Nathalie du Pasquier these are not the plants, skulls, books, fishes or guitars of tradition, but the everyday things of the studio – hand tools, shoes, trays and baskets. Nothing more exotic than a seashell, a patterned vase or an unusual stone. This is not a celebration of banality, but a means of concentrating the attention on how things are seen and painted. These works can also be seen in the tradition of the "metaphysical" still lifes of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra, in the sense that there is no false mystery built into their arrangements, but an attempt is made to release the visual marvels hidden beneath the surface of things.

 One feels that the still lifes have been composed on the painting rather than on a table in the studio. They have no part in the naturalist philosophy of recording what is in front of the painter, but are pictorial inventions in which the real objects serve to stimulate the painter's vision of the picture. The pictures have no anecdotal narrative in them and if there is an anthropomorphic element in the objects it is never personal in any psychological sense. If the objects have names or labels these are merely descriptive, since they are better represented by their images on canvas.

 How does the painter make these images visible ? Scale is very important. The absolute scale of representations is frequently many times greater than life size, nor does the relative scale of individual objects bear any fixed relationship to external reality These discrepancies serve to intensify the sense of presence of the objects, but also to reduce the significance of their "names". A pepper becomes primarily a colour variation of certain yellows joined to a precise green curve. It is not a giant pepper. A pair of scissors is a series of arabesques, joints and reflections, where the colours and positions of the shadows compete in importance with the object. The treatment of shadows is altogether significant. In general the cast shadows are reduced by an apparently consistent light source, thus giving a fragility to the otherwise implacably situated objects.

 Sometimes the cast shadows are removed altogether, the anchoring of the motifs then being achieved by small variations in textures. These textures are sometimes physical, dependent on a slight impasto in the paint, more often the result of subtle modulations of the whites in the ground. The modelling of the forms, the transition from dark to light, is in general achieved by simply deepening the tone of the local colour rather than by altering the hue of the shadow. An exception to this is in the small brush mark constructs used to describe large areas, for example woven baskets, where the pattern of the weave is made with colour rather than tone.

  The answer to the question posed at the beginning of the previous paragraph : "How does the painter make these images visible ?" can be found by looking for a long time at the paintings of Nathalie du Pasquier. These notes can only serve to stimulate that looking