Marcel

Marcel "Nino" PAJOT

(Vergt, 1945)

La Vénitienne

Mixed media on paper

H. 43 cm; L. 33 cm

Signed lower right

Early in childhood, Marcel Pajot gathered and nurtured the gift passed down by his mother, Reine Pajot-Védry, herself born in Vergt, whose modelling and terracottas bear the mark of a rare sensitivity and inhabited material. From this silent heritage sprang an early, almost organic vocation.

Autodidact, Marcel Pajot shaped his eye through encounters, in close proximity to artists, both amateur and established, at the Atelier de la Société des Beaux-Arts du Périgord, founded in 1978 by Jean-Daniel Ribeyrol and Paul-André Enard. In 1981, when he exhibited his work for the first time in the simplicity of a Périgord village, it was not so much a showcase as a first presentation of his inner research. For Marcel Pajot, the motif is never more than a threshold. It opens onto an obstinate quest for nuance, an almost meditative repetition of form and tone: deepening black to the abyss, softening gold to the whisper, making light vibrate in its most fragile intensity.

The series devoted to Venice and its festivities bear witness to this: the city is not described, but dissolved, reinvented in games and subjects, as if it were no more than a memory in suspense. Conversely, the figure of Don Quixote, to whom he tirelessly returns, runs through his work like an obsessive presence - a wandering silhouette, fragile and magnificent, the embodiment of an impossible yet necessary quest.

More rare, his landscapes of the Périgord nevertheless anchor his work in his land. They link him to that discreet, almost secretive tradition of a Périgord school where light, mass and silence count more than the picturesque. Here again, the point is not to represent, but to reveal a depth, a density of the world.

Thus, under the pretext of forms, Marcel Pajot pursues a more essential questioning. He watches for the passage of masks, questions figures, scrutinizes the moment when the visible flickers. And in this tension between appearance and effacement, it's always the human condition that emerges - fragile, uncertain, infinitely moving.

Our large sheet, from this vast Venetian series, is the portrait of an elegant masked woman, her features frozen by this papier-mâché face behind which intimacy hides.