Arnau Puig| Arnau Puig |
Paskua is an artist, born in the French harbour town Rouen. He tried the
"Beaux-Arts" famous art school in Paris. He stayed a longtime in
Sicilia in Italy. Then he started a single handed sailing trip on board a small
sail boat , heading to the South Pacific, towards those small French
pararadises that are still part of the overseas French speaking area. The
native Princess he found there, goes with him everywhere he puts up an
exhibition. She is his best supporter for the sincerity and quality of his work
of art. Natural realities and local
psychology of the places where they live together, are his main inspiration.
When I started this article I wrote
"artist", and I did so, before telling you this small resumé I was
told, when they stayed in Barcelone at the superb exhibition shown in the Reial
Artistic Cercle. I surely wrote "artist", because I discovered works
of art that could only have been created by an artist, by a very special
sensible and remarkably cultured and
open person.
Paskua does not paint because he learnt painting
(although he did so) but he paints because painting is for him a way to
express his ideas upon life and world
, through his sensibility.
Paskua lives, sees and hears the world.
And he reaches his aim using all creative
freedom he found, through the XXth century art, from expressionism, fauvism,
cubism, surrealism and informalism, everything that could open his
sensibility to artistic experiences. To
help this kind of expression to be more authentic, he has been using all the
opportunities his way of living was offering, diving into a peculiar human and
cultural context, as to face "primitive" cultures; stranger
to him although he knows them ,but
only from outside – in spite of the real
interest and love he has for them-. For a change, and because this was his
conviction, he claimed the necessity to assert his own culture and , with plastic means, claimed what he
believes is one of the reasons and vindications of art : to prove how one
can experience, feel, hear, understand
and expound what the others have to say, starting inside or outside of any
cultural reality, and still stay oneself, dicovered to oneself.
Paskua fully succeeds in this part. He proves it
by using old coprah bags as a support to his searches and esthetic working up:
In those remote South Pacific countries, goods and products are primitively
packed in rough bags made out of natural fibers and seamed with weaved coconut
palm leaves growing everywhere. Torn out , worn out, threadbare, those bags can
still be useful. Paskua found each of them as an ideal support to set his
sensible, sensitive and carnal expressions.
The artist uses the torn out bag as a holder for
his art. This peculiar weaving, made with leaves, still holding the original
label, marked with the name of the producer, making no difference between front
or reverse ,makes you think of the work of a sorcerer, a medecine man, the one
who knows and reveals the meaning of life and truth, the one who unveils the
very first knowledge to his people and who keeps the memory of the origins,
metamorphosing the shoddy cloth into memory knots, witnesses of the links which
ties them altogether with life itself. Once the artist is involved in such a cultural context, with such heavy
human symbols, his western sensibility forces him to give shape to all he
believes he should tell and do with these
expressive elements -( using paint,
pieces of fabrics collage, other organic and boddy materials , mixing
the local knowledge he built up in his surroundings and his own native
culture). Colours also have a
significant meaning, bright, violent,
red, yellow, white, green, blue colours. Each one wears a symbolic load
directly transferred to the rough and excessive strokes, drawing alusive shapes
of human or animal bodies , mixed with left over, stenciled social identities .
The western sensibility is shocked in front of
this amount of ideas, and moved by so
many emotions, sensations and forwarded memories. It is strange to notice that the natives
don't react differently when they hear their medicine men telling the world and
his history. This evidence is
significant as well as for the artist as for those who look at his work .
Paskua mixes so many cultural references and proceeds from so many great
inventors of his lineage that each element can be a reference and a guide to
find the way through the torn, hard, blunt, harsh and rough canvass which is infinitely sensible as soul and feelings
mirror.
Then, one should not say that Paskua's work is so much
different than Paul Gauguin's, one of his most famous predecessor in those far
countries. It's also for this reason
that when Paskua is told "primitive", he answers better
"belated " as the one who shows up with pain when we start to long
for a lost culture. What is sure, is
that this work of art wraps us into an acute sensibility and extremely violent
emotions that we could only and
anyway feel through our "westernity".
Paskua's work of art is wonderful. It is the Expressionism became Cult. »
Arnau Puig November 2007
*Arnau Puig was born
in 1926 in Barcelona. Philosopher and art critic, he is the co-foundator of the
Dau Al Set movement ( The Seventh Side of the Dice) with Antoni Tapiès,
Joan Brossa, Joan Ponç, Modest Cuixart et Joan-Josep Tharrats. Dau al Set is considered as the first and most important
artistic movement of the spanish post-war against Franco. Arnau Puig published
many philosophy and esthetic articles and books, from the two Manifesto of Dau
El Set, the Fringes of Art, the Artistic avant-garde in
Catalonia, the Sociology of shapes, and last his Conversations
with Antoni Tapiès ( Editor Horms, Barcelona, 2005)
Traduit du français par Claudine GOCHÉ
Janvier 2008