“Making art is not mythical, it is part of life” Nathalie Du Pasquier
Text by Helena Strängberg Velardi. Photography by Piotr Niepsuj.
In the early 1980s French born Nathalie Du Pasquier was one of the young founding members of the Milan-based Memphis collective. From their groundbreaking debut in 1981 until the dissolvement of the group in 1987, Nathalie worked as a designer, creating textiles, carpets, plastic laminates, furniture and objects. Her pattern designs—a fusion of geometrical and organic shapes in strong colour explosions—played a visible part in defining what Memphis was.
In 1987 Nathalie started painting in acrylic, then oil, and little by little turned away from design to focus on art. Over the course of three decades, she has produced drawings, textiles, sculptural objects and paintings. At the beginning, the drawings were naïve looking. Later, she started making painterly representations of space and surfaces, formally far away from her previous work. The colours changed, from the bright, acid shades of the earlier drawings and patterns, to a softer, more naturalistic palette. She started creating still life paintings, showing carefully placed objects, books, crockery and ceramics. The paintings played with perceptions of surface and depth, a water-filled glass distorting the image.
Helena Strängberg Velardi sat down with Nathalie in her bright and airy studio space in central Milan, to talk about drawing a line between art and design, of applying the Memphis Technique to collaborations, and the human activity of arranging objects.
