Pascale Consigny participates in the exhibition Exils – artists’ views at the Louvre Lens

I was guided by the need to fix traces of what I saw before disappearance”

Pascale Consigny

On December 13, 2015, Pascale Consigny went to the “jungle” of Calais to participate alongside “Charpentiers sans frontières” in the construction of a building to serve as a legal center for migrants.

Arriving at the place called “La Lande”, the artist films at random, without any documentary pretension, almost hidden, driven by the need to keep traces of this vast camp which would be dismantled a year later.

A few months later, she unearthed the film made and extracted screenshots from it with the idea of ​​making a series of small paintings. Through the filter of painting, the work of Pascale Consigny allows distance. A muted atmosphere envelops landscapes between sky and earth, in earthy and gray-blue shades. The fragility of barely sketched existences comes to the surface in paintings haunted by lack and absence. Everything is just suggestion or almost, like these blue tents, which “cut up space without ever achieving the stability of reassuring constructions – even though we know that they are at least shelters for those who did not have any before arriving there” remarks Eric de Chassey.  Silent paintings that open our eyes to contemporary dramas.