His signature: PPP, for Pascal Pinaud Peintre. Three letters that also symbolize an entire approach. Because yes, what calls to the gaze of this Côte d'Azur visual artist is reality in all its most direct, trivial, and beautiful aspects, it must be said! It is therefore in everyday life that Pinaud frees his gaze, allowing himself to be hooked by the sign of a bar-tabac, the shine of a car body, or the upside-down threads of grandma's embroidery. "I wasn't programmed to become an artist; no one took me to exhibitions as a kid. But a teacher in my final year of high school saw that I drew, so I ended up at the Beaux-Arts," quips this graduate of the Villa Arson, represented by the Galerie Catherine Issert. To discover Pinaud's discoveries, head to Narcissio in Nice. There, behind the Pépites boutique, which is full of handcrafted creations, we discover the artist's studio and his life-sized canvases – 1,75 m to be exact. Pinaud lets himself be captivated by the gestures, colors, and shapes that cross his path; he extracts them from the everyday, from their usefulness, to awaken the wonder of the banal. "I work in series. For example, in Accidents, I was thinking of the painter who more or less successfully places his colors on the canvas. So I organized collisions between the blue, red and green from Volvo, Renault, Citroën. Then there was Vandalism, scratches randomly marking the gleaming sheet metal,” says the artist, who created
37 series to date. Rather than going to paint the mountain opposite à la Cézanne, Pinaud cherishes in his painting the motifs of everyday objects. "My stock in trade is the seventies," continues the visual artist, who takes up the designs of a toile de Jouy or Delft plates when he's not creating works with a crazy collection of galette des rois beans. The history of PPP's art is that of our mothers and fathers, of family time, a popular history that belongs to everyone.