Preamble

Dearest Nathalie,

 I don't recall ever having spoken to you about the strange feeling that came over me when I discovered, not in a museum or anything of the kind, but reproduced side by side in a book on German art, two paintings revealing disconcerting analogies, and which in my opinion exist only to underscore an antagonism.

 The two painters are related, as is confirmed by their names: one's name is Pieter Claetz and the other's, Willem Claesz-Heda. As I know virtually nothing about either their lives or their careers, and given that the dates of their works are unknown, there is no way of knowing who preceded whom and thus which painting was produced in reaction to the first. All I can do is venture a hypothesis - which has all the value of a dream. Take it for what it is: a pure conjecture.

 I should first of all point out that these two beautiful paintings appear to have been done by one and the same person. What is more, they how two almost identical objects: a finely crafted glass, half full of wine, and a metal bowl tipped over on a tray. The glasses are truly indistinguishable whereas the bowls reveal marked differences. It is as if the artists had wanted to both assert their elective affinity and emphasise a perhaps ironical, perhaps polemical, but at any rate indubitably critical distance. While these similarities establish a paradoxical connivance between the two compositions, which have a curious tendency to engender a rigged mirror game, I should also point out the striking features which distinguish them, for these are not insignificant. In Willem's work, a white tablecloth covers the table top. On it are arranged two large plates whose centrepiece is, in the case of the first, a large, appetising looking pie that has scarcely been touched, and in the second, a small piece of the same pastry along with an overturned glass, a spoon and a dagger (at least I suppose that is what it is, for I cannot quite identify the object). Pieter's work, on the other hand, is more sober. Aside from the glass of white wine and the bowl, there are only two pewter plates (one of which contains nothing especially savoury looking, just some inconsequential leftovers, while the other contains a single olive). No tablecloth, but two dark-coloured nuts set on the dark wood. Thus, Willem's ostentatious wealth is in reply to Pieter's great austerity. But the two Banketje bathe in the grey light with its tinges of green, with a sort of silvery luminosity that dulls the golden browns of the bowl and saddens the subtle transparencies of the exceedingly well crafted, stemmed wine glass.

 Opulence and exuberance versus a faultless rigour and the same taste for luxury, but placed in an almost diametrically opposed perspective.

 These Ontbijtjes, so characteristic of the spirit of the North, are micro-dramas which are not there exclusively to celebrate the pure pleasure of the senses or to exalt a refined art that closely associates highbrow aesthetics with an epicurean posture. Without being vanities, which are ciphered combinations of objects chosen with jealous care, recalling that everyone is fated to corruption and destruction, they are nonetheless the malefactors of a melancholy-steeped meditation on the fragile beauties created by human industry and on the ephemeral and evanescent character of pleasures, even when they have been sublimated by art.

 Since the golden age of Dutch painting, which witnessed a profusion of still life paintings, with fowls of every description, convoluted desserts, candies that look as if they had been made by goldsmiths, all these opulent culinary scenes and all these devastating vanitas, along with the craze for tulips and highly emblematic bouquets, in short with this apology for the five senses, which had become instruments for measuring the universe and giving it meaning and value, the schools, styles and artists' innermost vision have evolved considerably - as is all too plain to see. But if the still life has changed meaning a thousand times, and come to condense a bundle of feelings and thoughts, fleeting impressions, little aesthetic emotions or a conception of how to paint, the most intrepid avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century still endeavoured to confer new ambitions on the genre with the Italian Futurists' teatro d'oggetti and the Surrealists' symbolically functioning objects.

 To conclude, I shall ask you simply this: don't you think that Giorgio Morandi just used his poor bottles, his vases and pottery to express a formal and tonal sensitivity without assigning them, even obliquely, any sort of figurative mission?

 And you? How do you fit into that long history?

1

 Glasses, bottles, jars, carafes, goblets, cups. And countless other things besides. Recipients of all descriptions, some of which, after having been purloined from the kitchen, the bathroom or the laundry room, and having been carefully stripped of their labels, adopt a new identity, a new formal aura, and perhaps even more.

 At the outset, there is nothing more commonplace than these arrangement of objects, without any erudite or cryptic relationship between them. And their coexistence strikes me as corresponding to a simple desire for plastic harmony, to subtle contrasts and highly economical connections of tonalities.

And yet, upon closer scrutiny, with the curiosity of sensations linked to the house's family realm (or what one identifies as such), but also in surrendering to the underhanded spell to which painting predisposes us, they lose some of their opacity and their obtuse character. The transparencies of the glasses sometimes bring about singular optical effects and even disquieting anamorphous. This universe, which has so many eminent qualities, gradually becomes a place of intrigue and fascination. It transmutes the elements which compose it, attributing them not with new graces or a supplement of soul (from being stand-ins, they are magically transformed into a superlatively existing being), but another being-there. So if they neither unveil their essence, as in the poems of Francis Ponge - it is in fact quite the reverse - nor find conferred upon them some surplus metaphysical value, as in the compositions by Giorgio de Chirico, their stubborn materiality is invaded by an indefinable evocative charge. Such that everything which had hitherto belonged to an order stripped of mystery, an order of an extreme triviality, finds itself redistributed in a sort of theatricality, free of both drama and pathos and even the slightest suspicion of narration. Within this sly alchemy, the sentient world is not so much transformed into a world of allegories or spiritual transports, as it is touched by the grace of a poetry that seeks to be light-hearted and discrete - a poetry that advances only in disguise, almost invisible and virtually imperceptible. For it is in this strategy that the art of Nathalie Du Pasquier lies: the impression of never touching, of remaining withdrawn, painting with modesty, never betraying what moves, inspires and impassions her. Behind this effaced countenance lies a real and profound ambition.

2
(short interlude)

 In some of her recent paintings, Nathalie Du Pasquier has introduced books next to funnels, balls of string, dominos, rubber gloves, plastic chairs, ashtrays and carpet slippers. The more she broadens the number of members of her small immovable furnishings of vulgar objects, the more the insidious presence of these volumes takes a turn that is singular to say the least. Of course, they are also things, manufactured things (and, in the staging devices, they are dealt with as such, without being made sacred for a second). To grasp the situation from which they originated, it is necessary to know that they often bear a title (for instance Conjugal Love, which has stuck in my mind), the name of the Italian publisher often being legible whereas the names of the hapless authors never appear at all. I am at a loss to explain this prescription. And, when one gets right down to it, what does it matter? The artist wanted to add a new clause to inspire curiosity with regard to her creations, which are constructed through infinite regression: their extremely pared-down character is incessantly troubled and enriched by tiny visual or semantic discrepancies.

 One way or another, this impromptu intrusion of writing in a microcosm that is as uncommunicative as the one she manipulates, has something unique about it. What does she want us to believe? That the book has lost its mythical power? No, there is not the slightest doubt about that. But it may still have its role in sowing discord in a space reserved for the most common intimacy. However, what I have in mind is another interpretation of this penchant for printed matter. Her love of objects, however mediocre and disinherited they may be; the counterpoint to the objects which were - and continue to be – of great importance in her life is her profound love of literature. By bringing together books - several copies of which one sees lying about in her studio - with pictorial compositions that are playful by definition, she seeks to remind the viewer that painting is a "thing of the mind" as Leonardo da Vinci put it - a mind's-eye view, and not merely a representation of the real. This, by no means fortuitous, decision to associate practical objects and objects reserved for reading provides one of the keys to shedding light on the nature of her research. In a certain respect, having grown accustomed to keeping her distance and refusing effect and history alike (as did, each from his own distinct perspective, Gnoli, Botero and Oldenburg), she manages - and it is no mean feat - to insinuate intensity, depth and a quivering of the soul, which does not betray her hand, involved in tracking the appearances of the real. Her bella mano is perverse in its innocence, for she holds herself back only in order to give pride of place to understatement. And it is in the hope of being able to speak under her breath, virtually in the most absolute silence.

3

 Attached to her painterly tricks, Nathalie Du Pasquier had never shown much interest for sculpture. From time to time, she would make up one of her "models," but only in order to study chromatic variation. An encounter, an opportunity arose unexpectedly, and suddenly new horizons opened up to her: the transposition of her two-dimensional works into a concrete volume. Very quickly, she was no longer satisfied to project her paintings into three-dimensional space, for a displacement of this kind imposes its own laws and consequent adaptations. She soon adopted a more constructivist approach, such that the architecture of each sculpture she produced took on a relatively geometric aspect. This rigour, which was her starting point, is thwarted by the fanciful character of her assemblages. The sometimes baroque shapes, given their extrapolation, their extremely bold colours, the oddities resulting from juxtaposing these objects whose practical identity has been lost and are now only seen as "abstract" and formal entities, whose relationships with one another have nothing to do with the conventional parameters of either figurative or abstract art. They maintain - as goes without saying - in spite of the series of interventions that modify their original specificity, part of their previous characteristics, and above all their industrial modernity, which is at once insolent and slightly ridiculous as soon as the objects are removed from their context. But in the end, the singularity of their design wins out over any other consideration.

 Placed on plinths, like old-style statues, they constitute groups that no amount of lyrical èlan can disturb. But once again, it is an unheard-of form of poetry that emerges brilliantly from their connections and their conflicts. These combinations integrate incisive humour and yet maintain a careful equilibrium which is underscored by linear planes, har-king back to the speculations of Russian artists in the age of Suprematism.

 The translation of their various initial materials into a single material - porcelain -is done in order to reinforce the doubt raised by these compositions which take the form of high-reliefs. They give the illusion of playing simultaneously on two levels, the old and the new, without the latter ever entirely carrying the day. Carrying out a transmutation through enamelling, the artist sought to preserve several distinctive traits specific to the functions of these objects in our society. This carefully cultivated ambiguity gives the work something ungraspable. What I mean is that an accursed share always remains, untranslatable in terms of artistic creation, and which cannot be dissipated. It is the very basis of the artist's wager. In so doing, she insistently accentuates the contrasts brought about by a restrained range of colours (grey, black, yellow and black; black, red, white and blue; red, black and white; black, white, green and purple...), which are forever becoming more incisive. The imperatives of the genre enabled her to subsequently abandon the sfumature she was inclined to introduce on the surface of the canvas, a manifestation of her esprit de finesse, which only the practice of painting makes possible. From a theoretical point of view, this shift pushed her to inventing another strategy and thus to put forward another sort of shift in the field of plastic experience.

 The piling up of various chosen objects thus gives rise to trivial little totems, which offer a derisory and humorous view on our everyday surroundings. It also has the effect of radically inverting the subject within these formal groupings. The functional substratum of these misappropriated objects, converted into the free and sovereign language of art, is the inexhaustible source of an underlying conflict between signifier and signified, even as the structure of the work remains primordial. But the pleasure in and of itself which one feels before these "friezes," before these gods without divinities from the post-industrial age cannot take place unless it is accompanied by a caustic and grating judgement of the present times, which nevertheless avoids any recourse to critical discourses that are now completely worn out.

 Metonymical par excellence, Nathalie du Pasquier's Still Lifes in Limoges china are spectacular traps, which at once seduce and trouble the viewer. What concealed designs do they serve? It is not up to me to tell you that. All I know - and I am relying entirely on intuition - is that they offer an unhoped-for opportunity to meditate on what we are, hie et nunc - held hostage by the very things we cannot do without. There exist no great works of art that do not carry within themselves a grand representation of our humanity and our destiny (or our destination). The representation which the artist has carried within herself, in this case, does not emanate from a system, and still less from an overall interpretation. It is the translation of a gaze that teaches others to see with greater acuity and depth that which can no longer be seen because it is all too visible. Therein resides Nathalie Du Pasquier's ultimate paradox: the more she gives herself over to abstraction, the more she renders reality meaningful, charged and still more concrete. Perhaps she ought to pass the test of the third dimension to get beyond the false dichotomy between the two major poles of her question, by hedging her bets and playing a double game.