Pascal MONTEIL (born 1968) Shepherd IV, 2024 Embroidered... Lot 25

Pascal MONTEIL (born 1968) Shepherd IV, 2024 Embroidered wool on hemp canvas 50 x 30 cm Courtesy Galerie Regala, Arles Pascal Monteil was last born in Nîmes in 1968. Before that, he was a weaver in Tabriz, a ceramist in Kyoto, an icon painter in Istanbul and a boatman in Calcutta. Jerusalem and Vienna still live in him. After studying fine arts at the Villa Arson, he spent 35 years living and unlearning on the roads of Asia. There, he searched for old and broken threads to reweave another history of painting. Following a retrospective entitled "Je ne reconnais plus le solei "l at the Château de Tarascon in 2017, he decided to set up his studio in Arles. Galerie Regala presents his latest works, which fold and unfold like road maps. But here it's an interior, disjointed geography; at the mercy of the sun. On 19th-century hemp canvases, Pascal Monteil weaves a thread that - according to Christian Lacroix - alternates between gouache, watercolor, glaze, thick oil and charcoal, scarifying the canvas, revealing day after day, month after month ( ) processions, exiles, frightened architecture, poets on stretchers, artists getting off their beds, boats for prophets and popes failing under the weight of flowers. We walk through this trembling universe as if in the ruins of ancient memories; we feel sheltered. Pascal Monteil seems to invite Morandi, Giotto, Van Gogh, Schiele or Behzad to slow, joyful apocalypses.