Raum Ermessen

About

Pascal Brateau attempts the almost impossible: to fold space; something invisible. He is not concerned with objects that are in space, but with those with which space itself becomes tangible, touchable. He says: "You can only understand space if you measure yourself against it; where "se mesurer" in French means to measure, but at the same time to confront, to encounter, in the sense of confronting, defying...A beautiful thought: to defy space, to wrest from it as an artist what you have to say. That means nothing less than asserting oneself in a space that is always socially determined, as a free space, a space of one's own, a play space, public as well as private.

Space, we could say with the great Sun Ra, who is known to have overcome even large spaces because he comes from Saturn, is THE big thing in general: Space is the Place. Pascal takes a much more pragmatic approach, and therefore also uses the obvious elements: Light and dark, inside and outside, fullness (form) and emptiness. - Lukas Feireiss *, author and curator, emphasises as simply as significantly that the terms space and place represent different concepts between which there is a dynamic relationship. This is precisely the tension in which Pascal Brateau confronts the personally claimed space with a place in which his work is supposed to assert itself.

This is not a simple occupation or claiming of space, but a very subtle claiming, an addressing, taking in, grasping and respecting, as tactfully as it should be towards it, the intangible place, the place that carries us, absorbs us and allows us to exist at all. Or more precisely: not opposite it, but in and with it, even if we often have to wrest our own existence from it, from the completely intangible.

The artist places himself in the space, he places, here quite literally, his house inside, a sign that leads beyond himself, but not to something else, but in return to himself again to an image, an image of the house: artistically charged, filled like a storehouse of ideas, a centre, the inner workshop of ideas. It is, in what is probably the most beautiful definition of art, "the fulfilled expression of inwardness making itself known" (Hegel).

Nathanaël R. Bartholomäus

*Editor Space is the Place, Current Reflections on Art and Architecture. Munich 2018/19

Pascal Brateau studied architecture in Nancy and Toulouse. He is co-founder of the studio dbdarchitects. He has lived in Berlin since 2010 and is involved in the cultural association Werkstadt e.V.. Together with the artist Aurélie Pertusot, he founded virgule3, a project that aims to support the networking of Berlin and French artists.