Alex Pascual
Alex Pascual is a figurative and interior draftsman working with color pencils who has exhibited in London, Newcastle, Berlin, and Kettinge, Denmark. Notable exhibitions include venues such as the Embassy of Brazil, Gallery Heike Arndt in Berlin, and Gallery Heike Arndt in Denmark. Alex has been featured with an article in Creative Boom magazine and he has been nominated for the Trinity Buoy Drawing Prize twice.
These color pencil renderings tend to depict women in isolated and enclosed interior spaces. Alex’s interiors and figures are highly distorted as if the image were pinched from a corner, containing elastic and angular curvature and focal points. His colors are often muted and toned down followed by strategic spaces filled in with white and subjects outlined with black lines. The women contained in the compositions convey body language which evoke melancholiness, sadness, despair, mourning, and perhaps even trauma. Such body language includes curling up in a ball on the bed, placing their heads down, or closing of the eyes.
Inspired by great 19th century masters such as Pierre Bonnard and Éduard Vuillard, Alex applies his own personal interpretation of how figures interact with their environments. Wearing contemporary attire with modernistic interiors , the women in Alex’s drawings are a reflection of current times. From depictions of skinny jeans hanging in a closet to lingerie as well as Adidas slippers and shoes placed on the floor, the interiors remind us of their contemporary inclinations and references. These sketchy and expressive interiors and women contain a variation of color derived from the imagination and design elements rather than of observation. Alex’s subjects contain a smooth blend of pale hues followed by thin irregular outlines of black indicating a separation of form. The play on perspective remains quite interesting with rooms and beds appearing to distort in ways as if to follow the angular limbs of the figures or to enhance the composition. Through stretching and weaving, the planes are guided towards angles which remain flat as well as directed towards our attention.
Sleeping on a Striped Blanket (pictured above) remains one of Alex’s most distorted figurative renderings. The woman, with her comfortable home attire, lays on a bed in a stiff position, however due to the angle of the bed she appears as if standing at an angle. Her cool tan, bright red cheeks, and bright red hair indicates she spends much of her time outdoors, whether at the park or the shore. She places her hands towards the stomach as if she were in the early months of pregnancy or expressing a mood of discomfort. The figure rests peacefully despite her hand gestures as the erratic bed follows the angular proclivity of her form.
Alex Pascual’s drawings are deeply expressive gestures in figurative language in regards to expressing sorrow and pain. Instead of depicting darkness, he chooses subdued, pale colorful tones to reflect these moody works along with spaces which reflect hallucinogenic, elongated visual interferences. With a sense of poetry and a reflection of everyday life, he chooses to express beauty and psychology in the forms of delicate, beautiful women interacting with enclosed interiors. Through isolating body language and sharp, penetrating perspective, Alex balances out his roughly sketched subjects with a soft color palette reflecting a balance in subtlety and sensitivity to light.
