Corine Pagny

Geste nu

The unspeakable erected in the shape of a joyful or grave palimpsest, Corine Pagny traces shapes and faces in the plane and space. Unbridled graphics, punctuated by bright colours. Minimalist scenes taken from the subject itself. An expressionist atmosphere where the curvilinear trajectory of the dark line evokes the last works of the great Antoni Clavé or the cyclo-esthetic reminiscences of Paul Smith working for Rapha.

What strikes at first sight is the lucid and luminous speed that carries the line to the essential of the signified. As in a text by Robert Zimmerman or a lithograph by Bob Rauschenberg. Everything is said immediately. Without remorse, without recourse, without artifice. The artist’s movement is in line with his poetic desire for expression. As if in black and white evidence. With no other limit than the emotion born of the imagination. Ink then, but also watercolour, acrylic or chalk, all techniques at the service of gesture.

Joining the aesthetic dramaturgy of a Franta or Ali-Khodja, the work is posed and asserted as the line takes on consistency with flat surfaces and casts. The subject exposes himself and explodes. All of beauty, suffering, presence and absence. There’s some dizziness in the air. Love. Hate. Life in spite of everything. I really only recently met Corine Pagny. But I have the revelation of an endearing and impressive work that drastically restores to me the globality of a contemporary artistic vision.

Without a commercial strategy, without any media or critical bias, Corine Pagny’s long-term work is an invitation to melancholic introspection. Better than a trip, an idea of all the others we hoped to meet along the way. From one bank to the other of an art history that blends with the history of peoples, there is room to restore aesthetic consistency to the wildest dreams.

- Salvatore Lombardo, Director of Art Sud - Art Historian