John Natsoulas Gallery

Exhibition: November 5th- November 29th
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 15th, 7 – 10pm

Marie and Jean Pierre Pascal belong to the century-old tradition of father-daughter artists. While Jean Pierre still lives and paints in Toulouse, France, Marie has lived and exhibited her work in California for nearly two decades. This show features both artists, offering up each body of work as a foil to the other. The harmony that resonates between the two bodies of work suggests an enduring bond and professional appreciation that exists between the two artists.

Marie Pascal's realist paintings of street scenes, skylines and cafés are engaging combinations of complementary elements. Marie is one of the most skillful watercolor painters in the world. Her detail and control are unprecedented in the field. While her brush stroke is carefully nuanced and her colors often glowing, her subject matter is more serious upon further reflection. Often her figures are alone in a crowd—anonymous and deep in thought. We see them through the yellow-orange glare of the sun in a shop window, or even as mysterious, faceless characters seated alone in the somber shadows of a busy café. In contrast to the soft, anonymous people that inhabit the paintings, the buildings assert themselves with stark silhouettes and hulking structural components that often dominate the mis-en-scene almost as energetically as the figures within it.

Jean-Pierre Pascal's paintings are like his daughter’s; beautifully rendered scenes that are both appealing and troubling. As the French art critic Michel Roquebert said, the most appealing element of hyper-real paintings is that they lead the viewer to doubt reality. His paintings seem at first unimposing—they are scenes of the quotidian, scenes of normalcy. Often his paintings feature a subdued pallet and restrained yet exquisite sense of balance and proportion. It is this inspired combination of ordinary scenes painted with an extraordinary care and fastidiousness that seems to suggest that there is a poetry to be found in the simple moments of everyday life.