Pascal Colrat

6 Months of Daydreams

Pascal Colrat was born in 1969 in the suburbs of Paris. He studied drawing and photography at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the centre of gravity for talented and creative young artists. While still a student Colrat focused on the poster that combines text and image as a medium for his art. He was attracted to the poster by its democratic qualities, providing the opportunity to meet a very broad public including people who never visit museums and galleries.

‘I was always bothered by the sacralisation of the original,’ writes Pascal Colrat. ‘One day, quite by chance, I encountered the art of the poster. I was fascinated right away by the principle — the reproduction of a drawing or photograph in several thousand examples. The idea of the series, of reproduction, has since become a constant in my work’.

Today Colrat is one of the most popular illustrators in France, with covers for the newspapers Liberation and Rue 89 and drawings for Le Monde to his name. He collaborates with the Centre Georges Pompidou, the European House of Photography, the Comédie-Française Theatre, Amnesty International, etc.

The works that comprise the ‘6 Months of Daydreams’ exhibition are also printed graphic works, but essentially the reverse of what he does for newspapers and magazines. While devising his famous covers Pascal Colrat is under constant pressure from looming deadlines. The drawings collected here under the title ‘6 Months of Daydreams’ exist in a completely different time zone. These are unhurried perambulation that sets us free from everyday bustle, allowing us to follow the author’s flight of fancy. From the second half of the 20th century modern art has been dominated by critical discourse and social commitment. The author of ‘6 Months of Daydreams’ is an artist moved by purely humanistic pathos. Humaneness, kindness and the ability to dream are his concern in these works. It could be said that his work freely develops the ideas of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, creator of ‘Le Petit Prince’, which was first published in 1943 and has remained ever since as an outstanding manual for humanism in the 20th century and in our own times brimming with the latest hot news.

While preserving the basic principle of the poster, Pascal Colrat’s printed graphics combine image with text. They are created on the basis of pencil or Indian ink drawings. Here the original drawing is only a prototype, a rough sketch that is scanned and developed using a computer programme. The prototype drawings also feature in the exposition, allowing us to follow the transformation of the artist’s thought process from initial idea to finished result.