09/02/2025
Pascale Risbourg
Pompei Candlesticks
The Pompei sculptures, precariously balanced columns like those like those in a Hubert Robert painting, seem at first to us to have been architecture of the past. Yet they are the product, not of the ravages of time of experimentation, a jubilation of form and color that is characteristic of Pascale Risbourg's work: a whole fantasy landscape of vulnerable shadows. Pascale Risbourg's Pompeii candlesticks and vases are totems of nature's final triumph: their shapes are born of the creative accident that the artist provokes by jostling her forms, by heckling them. Letting error and material deformation express themselves. Her assemblages are the result of a long gestation period. To begin with, she fashions a library of free-form shapes. While letting the clay express itself in the firing, she uses all the techniques available to her (pitching, slab, colombin...). Then she invents her glazes: a recipe mixed with method, she juggles with her beautiful natural colors that seem directly extracted from Italian facades (cameos of brown, cognac, ochre, Sienna earth) and evoke the melancholy evocation of an Italian cobbled street, where time will have passed. Then it's time for the construction game, and here it's her great joy to take her time finding the balance: faced with her library of dozens of scattered pieces, which Pascale Risbourg sees as the vocabulary of a language yet to be invented, she makes, unmakes, starts again. The stranger the form, the more it interests her. The exercise seems to serve to surprise herself. In the end, her caprices (capprici), with their fragile harmony, are in no way arbitrary: they are the result of a lifetime's research, that of an imperfect perfect that will lead her to the right form.
Lise Kervenic
