Pascal Chove | Figurative painter

Pascal Chôve was born in 1963. He studied painting at the applied arts school Ecole des Arts Appliques Duperre in Paris, and graduated from the Ecole des Arts Appliques with Diploma in sculpture. At the start of his career, he used to work mainly with wood since he did not like canvas, finding it too soft and unsuited to scratch, scrape or groove his pictures and, in terms of outline and finish, he always wanted to break away from over-traditional and over-defined painting.

His technique is to make the center of his painting very elaborate, almost hyper-realist, and the further the viewer moves from the center, the more ill-defined Ch ve the subject becomes. It is as if the painting has faded over time – as though he had worked on an old decrepit wall, playing with surfaces of an imaginary past. His paintings have the appearance of a piece of fresco that seems to have been cut out of a ruined wall – and there is even evidence of pencil sketches underlying the finished work.