In 1987, Nathalie Du Pasquier (1957) decided to devote herself entirely to painting. A few years earlier, she had moved to Milan and helped found Memphis, a collective of ‘irreverent’ designers who advocated sensual and stimulating design, breaking with minimalist and functionalist forms.

That same year, Pierre Charpin (1962) saw his very first object published. Born into a family of artists living in Ivry-sur-Seine, he studied at the Beaux-arts de Bourges in the art department, where he discovered the ‘rebellious’ design of the Milanese Alchimia and Memphis groups. Their hyper-colourful designs opened up a new field of expressive possibilities for him.

Nathalie Du Pasquier and Pierre Charpin became friends in the mid-1990s. Objects, a taste for drawing, shapes, colours and surfaces were their common ground.

Self-taught, Nathalie Du Pasquier trained herself by travelling, experiencing different cultures and observing. Her work is driven by the sheer pleasure of painting and drawing, using intuition and collage, like overlapping thoughts. It combines flat surfaces and volumes, in a constant back-and-forth between two and three-dimensional space.

For Pierre Charpin, everything begins with drawing. His drawings are created with economy of means and do not seek to represent a form; they are forms. They feed into his design, which is above all a study of basic archetypal figures, proportions and colours, rather than a question of material.

He designs sculptural objects that are restrained, refined but not austere, whose poetry stems from the pencil strokes that brought them to life.

The exhibition designed for Crédac brings together works from all periods and combines paintings, installations and objects. It circumvents codes and expectations, abolishing any chronology, hierarchy, classification or distribution, and places their respective works under a new spotlight to play on formal or semantic relationships and create new configurations. Their works inhabit the space and constitute a landscape celebrating the gestures and friendship of the two artists.