Nadia Pasquer

“Galaxie”

7 September – 7 November 2013

Nadia Pasquer. Galaxie. Polyèdres de terre polie enfumée. Taille de 1 à 30 cm.

Nadia Pasquer’s work really began to develop from 1990 when she directed her attention towards smoke-fired earthenware and abstract forms, the mastery and precision of which made the artist famous.

The volumes presented are the result of an intuitive declination of the five platonic solids – the “perfect solids”, namely the Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron, and Icosahedron. Without base or direction, they are positioned on their own balance point bearing their centre and their movement from within.

Each object is unique. Together they form a unity.

Polished, engraved, and perforated in order to inscribe on them a heavenly cartography, the sculptured elements are called by the artist “starred polyhedrons”. As for the artist, citing Gaston Bachelard in ” La terre et les rêveries de la volonté” (The Earth and the Reflections of the Will), these two words contain “the synthesis of images of deepest earth and of starry heavens; an astonishing synthesis of the constellation and the crystalline reveries.”

Smoked, the volumes are of a brilliant black, and are both captors and emitters of light – objects of contemplation.

Left in their pure whiteness, they design light and shade in soft or extreme contrast.

Exhibited on the great squares of contemporary art, notably New York, Miami and Bâle, the works of Nadia Pasquer benefit today from international recognition

“Presented for the first time in the gallery, Nadia Pasquer’s work occupies a unique place on the contemporary ceramic scene. Of an absolute perfection, and an incomparable emotional touch, her polyhedra evoke celestial bodies and constellations born on the boundaries of different territories as much physical and sensory as mental, questioning the tension between near and far. It is not by accident that these objects are hand-sized, indeed through them juxtapose intimacy and space, geometry and sensuality, singularity and universality.
The power of her pieces, stems from her use of the simplest and most ancient techniques, the essence of ceramic art that of modelling and polishing clay, which itself evokes a poetry even beyond the realms of ceramics, resonating in the collective imagination. One can even find echoes of other disciplines in them such as origami whose spiritual dimension is, in general, neglected. Neither functional nor decorative, these “space stones” are rather objects of meditation, like meteorites having crossed centuries of distance separating us from Luca Paccioli and his figures of Divine Proportion or Albrecht Dûrer and the polyhedron of his Melencholia. They interrogate the links between Art and Science and the Mystery of the Universe.”