Pascal Chôve

Pascal Chôve was born in 1963. He studied painting at the applied arts school Ecole des Arts Appliques Duperre in Paris, and graduated from the Ecole des Arts Appliques with Diploma in sculpture. At the start of his career, he used to work mainly with wood since he did not like canvas, finding it too soft and unsuited to scratch, scrape or groove his pictures and, in terms of outline and finish, he always wanted to break away from over-traditional and over-defined painting.

His technique is to make the center of his painting very elaborate, almost hyper-realist, and the further the viewer moves from the center, the more ill-defined Chôve the subject becomes. It is as if the painting has faded over time - as though he had worked on an old decrepit wall, playing with surfaces of an imaginary past. His paintings have the appearance of a piece of fresco that seems to have been cut out of a ruined wall - and there is even evidence of pencil sketches underlying the finished work.

Chôve 's paintings open us to a world where the creative idea reaches below the immediate surface of the subject matter. The themes in his most recent paintings, the product of many years of work, enable us to uncover Chôve's personality in which women play an essential part. One could say that today the artist has crossed into the human sphere by depicting living people in a theatrical manner who move us - and although detached, always serene.

Chôve does not try to impart a message, but rather to show us that between memory and the future he has managed to build a bridge taking us back to the deepest level of our soul. Thus, on a level below the simple appearance of the picture, the artist takes us on a journey through time.