Mélanie Pasquier

Between features and matter, a sensory journey. The point as an atom, the body of the work in gestation, the fruit of a necessary slowness ... Shape and form of memory On the ochre and earthy backgrounds of Mélanie Pasquier's canvases, enigmatic, fantastic and hybrid forms unfold. Point by point, line by line, they swarm, crawl, and take on the body that the artist patiently imprints on them. From canvas to canvas, they come to life, disturbing and strange, hesitant; here they erupt but there they fall from unsuspected heights. The bits of trees rub shoulders with bits of bodies, bones, teeth, hair, anonymous and miniature figures; feet and hands are engulfed in torrents of branches, leaves, algae, pebbles and clods of earth. But here an eye watches, a figure appears, two fingers rise and titillate a body-pocket-bag of hair from the end of which the vaporous form of the memory escapes. It is precisely from this source that Mélanie Pasquier draws her inspiration. That of the tactile memory of a hand passed through the earth or through the hair of a loved one, of a furrow traced in the ground with the tips of the fingers or of water impossible to grasp between two hands. How to translate the sensation? How to transcribe the nebulous numbness into which thought plunges when it wants to remember the materiality of the past? Mélanie Pasquier's paintings are the image of the Dream; dreamlike, floating, plasmic. They are the tables on which to expose the excavated remains of her mind and of an oxymoric memory, because they are both tactile and impalpable. Thus the forms spring up on a background that has no earthly substance other than colour. Here and there, the drips and fades, the liquid and faded colours translate the evanescence and passage, the impossible attachment of what constantly escapes. But the black contours of his drawings offer memory the material anchorage it needed to exist in the eyes of the world, to finally emerge from the "witch" who gives form to the memory filaments, and the title of the exhibition. Sensory memory is an ambiguous and fertile breeding ground. It is the belly that carries the bodies in gestation, the cavity from which they flow, by free association of motifs, before unfolding in the light and finally docking somewhere: on the artist's canvas. Point by point, line by line, the vague subterranean of memory is then gently illuminated. Rustling, impatient, it finds a second life in art. Proud to have escaped limbo and oblivion, she deploys her space in the interstice opened by the painting between life and death, the cave and its beyond, the ivory or horn doors that separate Aurelia's Nerval from the invisible world of the Dream and Mélanie Pasquier from her memories. Text by Horya Makhlouf