Between the threads of ink and embroidery by Pascale Roux
We first met in August 2021 at the Contemporary Art Festival in Dives-sur-Mer, and met again by chance at the Salon d’Automne 2024 in Paris. Pascale Roux was exhibiting a remarkable painting with the Mythes et Singularité group led by Patricia Berquin. An opportunity to forge artistic links.
A gentle, lush celebration of life and nature
The painting presented by Pascale Roux at the Salon d’Automne, entitled Le Jardin d’Amour (The Garden of Love), is richly composed and dreamily dense.
It’s full of detail, inviting you to dive in and explore every hidden corner. Its composition combines plant, floral and organic forms with human features.
Nature and humanity are in symbiosis. From this profusion vibrates a vital, fertile force. The human face embedded in this profusion of detail is certainly a focal point, but it invites the eye to explore the canvas as a whole.
Many of Pascale Roux’s works deal with the theme of nature, which deserves to be treated with respect and gentleness by humans, who should let it develop its luxuriance without interfering too much. On the occasion of our conversation at the Potager du Roi in Versailles, Pascale shares with us her taste for gardens.
Pascale Roux, visual artist and illustrator
A daughter of the south, she grew up with two brothers, alongside parents who were Sunday painters who had met while painting the same Provencal landscape. After two years at the Beaux-arts in Avignon, she went on to study at the Villa Arçon in Nice. Since then, she has been drawing, painting and embroidering.
She uses thick ink on soft, unctuous cardboard, which allows for fluid, continuous lines.
For children’s literature, she is an illustrator and sometimes an author-illustrator. As in her painting and embroidery work, she is interested in popular beliefs. With the publisher Grandir in Nîmes and L’Initiale in Marseille, she has published “L’ogresse aux longues oreilles” (The ogress with the long ears), a story based on a Siberian tale, “Le jade des Maori” (The Maori jade)… and illustrated tales from Australia, Brittany…
With the theater company “Après la pluie” (After the Rain), she takes part in workshops with children at the Timone hospital in Marseille.
Embroidery, an ancient feminine and domestic craft (and often the only source of escape in societies that confined women), is now becoming a feminist means of expression.
Today’s artists are reinvesting thread and needle drawing. For example, Pascale embroiders to tell the story of remarkable women such as the Roman girls forced into marriage who resisted. Their suffering elevated them to the rank of Saints (Lucia, Agathe, Eulalie…). This saintly status enables them to stay alive and declare to us: I’m here, I’ve conquered!
When she embroiders, Pascale has the impression of drawing, and when she draws, she rediscovers the sensations of embroidery. In her drawings, she uses a lot of chain-stitch motifs, and she mixes ink with her embroidery work.
Pascale Roux fully belongs to the Outsiders artists family whose generosity, sincerity and freedom she shares.
The editorial team
The thrill of artistic discoveries
