Discover the contemporary work of Gérard Pacaud

My childhood in poor, rural Vendée experienced all the colorful scents of the alluvial meadows of the Loire, its flowers and its herds, with renewed wonder. I liked it ocean storms, brutality rainstorms and flashes of lightning from which I sheltered under my blue cloth cape. I enjoyed it, impatient with the rhythm of the seasons.

I was born a pencil by hand, I colored it notebook ends and scattered sheets, bad papers, priceless treasures. I traced and copied images in the margins of my books, living these minutes of freedom like a happy convict.

Adolescence was a wandering quest, my first Museum, Cantini in Paris. Marseille, brought me my first deep emotion in front of a retrospective of Vincent Van Gogh. I started to do this. paint and I never stopped, soon seventy years of searching for a fortunately elusive Grail: burying myself in shapes and colors with a benevolent mentor ;a brother ten years older than me, first prize in Nantes Fine Arts.

Lucky or bad luck, I also really liked school. I then committed myself to in studies of medicine, science and biology. At twenty-five I had to "choose" a double life combining my two passions. The world of cells and the cosmic world added  à my perplexity countless questions. I therefore decided to paint my perceptions; I then practiced medicine, biology teaching and painting on the same wavelength, with different frequencies.

Medicine, painting, biology, astrophysics are not practiced as professions. These are passions where reason nibbles its share, always on the margins of constituted bodies and institutions. One day we give in, we love this rocky path too much that leads to the place where we live. isolation, meditation,  à painting, writing. One day we take everything away and express ourselves, as best we can. Our imagination produces life, meaning.

I exhibited a lot during the free time granted by a demanding profession. Bad merchant, I sold at random encounters. My work over the past twenty years has taken on significant dimensions and remains offered.

The desire to paint is not in my head but in my fingertips which transmit it to the brush or to the pencil. all the tools available. It is the body of the painter in its unity. which is animated from the desire to paint. Painting is always a pact, undoubtedly a pact of love, with my body, with the expected Other.

I would like to work  so that a small corner of the veil is lifted. My confidence is limitless. I am never disappointed but always sent back. à the white canvas, the lack of fullness. Who will be able to read the suffering of imperfection and lack that each traced line, that each touch of color applied, assumes for me? Who will be able to project their dismay onto it so that I experience it as a sign, a godsend of encounter?

I paint. It’s a drive into the absurd.

I paint beyond of understanding, far from reasoning, in an awareness of reality expressed by my colors and my shapes, in a language without words which is indeed the domain of the absurd. Latin typology confirms this to us, the pictorial arts  are beyond of understanding, they are "forgetting the word" in favor of another consciousness of reality.

This absurdity constrains us because it imposes the body and its cellular structure, it imposes space and its multiple cosmos as the place of this unavoidable reality which invites us  à the meeting where words are insufficient. It is then necessary to grasp the drawn shapes and colors dispersed according to multiple techniques to give something to the senses. see. Representation is not appropriate. the clash between figurative painting and so-called abstract painting is becoming obsolete.

Painting is then this means of expressing the man delivered by nature. to the real world in its entirety, in its immensity, in its intimacy unprecedented.

And much more.

For life preceded man, it has taken a head start and we are crossed by this great breath that evolution has provided for three billion years. Our languages are only faint rumors in the great maelstrom of countless forms in constant rearrangement. The colors and the thousand possible forms imposed themselves even before the idea. ;man emerges within these billions of uninterrupted transformations over these billions of years.

Painting is therefore at the very heart of the absurd and becomes the expression of the most intimate of heritages, the one delivered to us by all the species that preceded us ;deaths. To paint is to put into practice day legacy. It’s carrying the torch.

I paint to transmit, to perpetuate this long lineage and to grant all its mysteries.

I paint to meet you in this intimate agreement with the traditions of the living.