Tout dépendait du temps

Since 2010, like an obsessive modern Balzac, Pancin has been exploring, gleaning, peeling away, classifying and reinventing the lives of these men who have sought tirelessly for snatches of freedom in every last fragment of their confined lives. The prisoners living in this extremely violent world endlessly draw the bodies of voluptuously curvaceous women, lovers’ hearts, and boats whose sails evoke the other world outside, the world beyond their reach. The artist appropriates and conveys back to us all the manifestations of the prisoners’ lives, like the balls of wool thrown to them by their wives and girlfriends from the Doms rock, at the heart of the promenade, but which never reached them, having instead became caught on the roofs or in the gutters, from which the archaeologist later removed them.