Pascal Heranval

Pascal Heranval is a self-taught artist born in Canteleu, France, in 1958. He lives and works in Rouen.

Until 1999, Pascal Heranval dedicated himself to music, which led him to study and work in Brazil from 1988 to 2002, and then he returned to France. It was during his long stay in Salvador de Bahia that he discovered naive painting and popular imagery of the Brazilian Northeast, but it's Cordel's literature and his wooden engravings that influence him to join the engraving workshop at the Modern Art Museum of Bahia, where he took lessons given by Antonello Abatte from 1999 to 2001. Side by side, he began painting and developing his graphic language; his first exhibitions were during this period.

The main topics of the artist derived from a few questions: What is man versus nature? His nature? Is man just a monkey who became crazy due to thoughts or the ultimate creation?

Like a Renaissance portrait artist, Pascal Heranval presents figures on a stylized natural background, but the shades of gray make the setting look fossilized or burnt out. As he's an engraver, he only uses dots or lines to make shapes with the light of the background, playing around with black and white paper and the canvas or the grains and warm tones of wood: his favorite material Color is present for subtly tinting the image by optically mixing the colors for the spectator's eye.

His main references are Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Psychedelic Art, traditional and popular arts.