ARTIST STATEMENT

​

Pascale Jean is a Canadian oil painter exploring the collective self through the colourful depictions of social concepts and habits on her canvases. Notions of gender, social customs and interpersonal relationships, taboos, identity and anonymity, as well as community-based dichotomies are analyzed through the artist's conceptual scenes. Pascale's work is an apparatus to process the strong emotions caused by the tumultuous relationship of her exploration of life into a tangible, recognizable form that her generation can relate to.

 

Frequently depicting, or simply alluding, to sexuality in her work, Pascale uses the strength sexuality has on the collective psyche as a metaphor in order to delve deeper into the meaning of her art. The painter offers a platform to various repressed social concepts by transforming them into vibrant figures, or desolate shapes and objects through her paintings. Creating subtle narratives and nuancing her subjects through the liberal use of classical symbolism and colour coding, a cynical humour dots her work. The over-saturated colours she uses directly reference the current cybernetic age, where the line with the digital world gets blurrier everyday, thus addressing her psychosocial and philosophical concerns arising therefrom. Aiming not only to criticize and inspect society, Pascale seeks to highlight the beauty and complexity of human nature, thus also striving to create aesthetically pleasing works with a harsher meaning, thereby welcoming the paradoxical nature of her work, and community life.