India 4

Pascale Mer belongs to the group of painters who, at the end of the 20th century, question painting in terms of meaning and substance and take stock of what remains.

What remains, after all, is not the style, but the elements of painting itself: the colour, the form, the format and the duct.

What is new in the twentieth century is the awareness that a painting can have a will of its own and that the painter is a kind of medium through which this will is realised.

Pascale Mer seems to share this view of the autonomy of the picture, for she tries to keep her own ratio out of the act of painting as far as possible.

In her paintings, an inner harmony is created that unites opposing elements.

One looks through transparent layers of paint from which form elements emerge that are reminiscent of calligraphic signs, of a secret script that cannot be deciphered.

Characteristic of Pascale Mer's new paintings are the surfaces applied with delicate colours and the almost monotonous rhythms of those sequences of signs that seem almost identical.

A calmness emanates from these works that offers a pleasant antipole to the hectic hustle and bustle of the big city.

Pascale Mer's painting positions itself in the inexplicable.

Her starting points are the deep layers of subjectivity, which dissolve in the meditative act of applying paint and become forms, forms that are repeatedly questioned, i.e. reworked, until a harmony emerges that encompasses all the components of the painting.

Dr Helmut Orpel from Art Profil 1999 /5th volume