Paul Pignol

Paul de Pignol was born in France in 1965. He lives and works in Paris.

In 1984, he entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in Pierre Carron's painting workshop. He created his first sculpture Fille au Ballon in 1989, inspired by Lucas Cranach's Venus. Little by little, sculpture became an essential part of his work.

From 2010, drawing takes on a particular importance when he decides to devote a specific studio in Paris to it. From then on, a kinship between these disciplines became obvious. Whether he sculpts or draws, Paul de Pignol reveals a unique process: a dive into the intimate substance of being. His work focuses mainly on the female figure around universal themes: birth, life, death. Through the exploration of the female body he questions its function, its mass, its composition, its decomposition and its presence in a back and forth between inside and outside.

The artist's drawings are the extension of a research work on volumes where he perpetuates the sculptor's gesture by placing the light by small touches of erasure of matter. The bodies thus revealed possess a spectral presence.

Since 2017, and after years of failures, rejections and wanderings, Paul de Pignol finds a pictorial language complementary to his research. His exhibition Né du Limon at Loo & Lou Gallery in 2019 is the result of this quest. Primarily focused on the theme of landscape, influenced by the proximity of his studio to the forest of Fontainebleau, the artist does not deviate from his earlier obsessions. The idea that all life can be born of decay and putrefaction still haunts and fascinates him. He obtains moving organic landscapes. One feels the peat and the humus. We are close to the Golem. This exhibition brought together for the first time drawings, sculptures and paintings, which represents for the artist, both in terms of the subject he treats and the multiplicity of mediums used, a joyful and fertile renewal.