An unrelenting struggle between primitiveness and culture, as well as between inside and outside, is at play in Pascale Simont’s sleeping bodies, whether these are lost in a dream state or contorted in shock. Faces are a common element in the artist’s work, like internalisations and incarnations of her recurring abstract digressions, or expressions of deep feelings. At the slim border between what is and what should be, the tumefied bodies seem to be caught between two states – that of the social being that one builds from childhood, and expected to become embodied either in the form of a woman, a mother or a housewife, but also as an athlete or as the primitive, instinctive animal body. The composite paintings, videos or objects that Pascale Simont creates are as many sketches, questions and attempts to build around this duality. Sometimes, the borders and horizon of the island on which Pascale Simont has lived since 2000 seem to insinuate themselves into the artist’s work, like echoes of this inner fiction.

Laetitia Espanol, 2020.

Translated by Lucy Pons | Biographical notes translated with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap.