Specially composed in her Milan studio, Nathalie Du Pasquier presents still lifes bringing together objects, drawings, books, and photographs—assembled like fragments of an intimate language. Each composition is accompanied by a short text by the artist, revealing the stories and resonances of the chosen elements. Like a "Chinese portrait," the book unfolds as a poetic and singular self-portrait, inviting the reader to enter the artist's sensitive universe.
Conceived as a studio notebook, this book brings together a series of compositions by Nathalie Du Pasquier, created directly on the floor of her studio in Milan. Everyday objects, drawings, books, photographs—each composition is made up of carefully chosen elements, like fragments of an intimate language. These visual arrangements, both precise and instinctive, reveal her way of combining forms and colours, of creating dialogues between things, in a balance specific to her pictorial practice. They offer a rare glimpse into her world—an off-screen view of her work.
Each image is accompanied by a short text written by the artist. With a tone that is unmistakably hers—humorous, poetic, direct—these texts reveal the stories, resonances, memories or coincidences that link the elements together. This back-and-forth between image and writing gradually forms a subtle self-portrait, like a Chinese portrait.
The book's design echoes the drawing pads the artist uses in her daily practice, highlighting the importance of paper, format, and drawing as a space for reflection. Part visual journal, part object collection, part sensitive narrative, this book offers a new perspective on Nathalie Du Pasquier's work—shaped by the clarity and freedom of her unique vision.
A famous designer and co-founder of the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, Nathalie Du Pasquier (born 1957 in Bordeaux, France, lives in Milan, Italy) accompanied the (post)modern adventure around designer Ettore Sottsass, with the creation of objects, fabrics, carpets, and furniture. In 1986, she started devoting herself exclusively to two- and three-dimensional painting. Memphis's radicalism and formal inventiveness measured solely in terms of a scathing and iconoclastic postmodernism erased a little too quickly the adventure's modern foundations. Nathalie Du Pasquier's paintings are a perfect revelation of these connections: axonometric compositions applied to painting, the palette of muffled colors, objects, when they are present in the compositions, wink at the purism of a Corbusier or an Ozenfant. Mixed with memories and assimilations arising from the most tridimensional Suprematism–the architectones–some paintings and constructions also give prominence to this history of art and the applied arts.
