Pascale Jean

Pascale Jean (b.1999) is a French-Canadian artist based in Montreal. Her painting and sculptural practice, shaped by a childhood spent in the northern forests of the Saguenay Fjord, weaves visual connections between the human and the natural world. Through bold visual play between colour and bodily distortion, she amplifies the tensions embedded within her narratives.
Trained at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (France) and holding a BFA from Emily Carr University (British Columbia, Canada), Jean explores psychological discomfort through colour and play. Insects, distorted humanoids, and symbols drawn from the collective psyche fuel her irreverent approach to human malaise.
Her work has been exhibited in Japan, Canada, France, and Mexico, and has been featured by acclaimed organizations such as Hyperallergic, CBC Arts and Suboart Magazine. Jean’s practice has been supported by both private and public entities, including LOJIQ.
Strongly inspired by linguistic tensions, Jean addresses themes of resistance, resilience, discomfort and alienation through a deliberately expressive visual language. She extends her research on play as a tool for releasing tension by adopting a diary-like narratological approach, creating a visual archive rooted in lived experience.
Recently, Jean’s work has been presented in Montreal as part of the Festival Hors Service and at Maison de la Culture Marie-Uguay.

***

Jean’s artistic practice explores psychological discomfort through a colourful and playful approach. Dividing her work between oil painting and sculpture, she reveals a narrative sensibility that draws on symbols rooted in the social psyche. Through the interplay of colour and storytelling, viewers are invited into off-kilter sensory experiences.
Inspired in particular by linguistic tensions, Jean addresses themes of resistance and resilience through a deliberately expressive visual language. Delving into discomfort and alienation, she extends her research by using the diary as a narratological framework—a visual archive of elements drawn from lived experience.
Transformed into complex stories on her canvases, these memories take on an aesthetic that is both inviting in its use of colour and unsettling in the vulnerability it exposes, like a perpetual tug-of-war.

Building on Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which posits play as essential and inseparable from human development, Jean adopts the notion of “play” to describe her irreverent examination of human discomfort.
Play materializes through the creation of intermediary spaces where art becomes a site of mediation between intimate experience and the external world. Optical play between chosen colours reinforces the sensation of looking at something forbidden, distorting the image as the eye attempts to make sense of it.
Hypersaturated colours, references to intimacy and bodily distortions become tools for deconstructing perceptual norms, inviting viewers to oscillate between attraction and unease.
The omnipresence of insects heightens narrative tension. The immersive environment she creates engages viewers in a perceptual game where discomfort becomes an aesthetic terrain, prompting them to examine their own relationship with unsettling emotions through an experience that is both seductive and destabilizing.