JEAN-LUC BLANC – FAUX-ROMAN VISAGE
2014-03-31In order to understand Jean Luc Blanc’s work, it is necessary to question the place occupied by images and more particularly the representation of the human figure, as well as the way in which the artist deals with it both in his choice of colors and in the construction of his drawing. By their occasional coarseness, the drawings often manage to undergo a process of de-subjectivism and break free from the average editing processes of contemporary imagery. Nowadays images at once belong to everybody and to no-one, a 15th Century Icon or any simple picture in a contemporary tabloid-magazine both find their triviality increased, while the lack of mystical aura tends to exhaust their power to “ speak to us and generate desire” (1), but what kind of desire are we referring to? In his work on images, Jean Luc Blanc redefines the idea of desire by operating a detachment between his subject and its context while at the same time introducing a notion of absurdity that will allow him to alter not only the tragic aspect of the vast process leading to the excess of global media coverage and the dumbing down of society, but also, by means of a highly developed and often cynical sense of humor, to express the resulting forms of social distress and the human behavioral disorders that it provokes.
This work tackles notions of absurdity, a sense of dismay, as well as reflections on the disgrace of a given epoch, but also the symbolic value of an image by means of the disjunction between what we see and what we feel. Akin to film-making mechanisms, especially to the techniques used by Marguerite Duras when, in her films, a voice-over describes things that the spectator cannot see, allowing him to create his own images; Jean Luc Blanc’s images leave us free to find multiple interpretations and go beyond the pre-established codes linked to painting in general, and to portrait-painting in particular. In his work, we won’t find “up to the waist” or “full length” classically framed figures; and academic rigidity is soon left behind; the framing of these frowning, plaintive and disquieting faces is strange.
Opposite – L’immortel prémice, 2014
Exhibition runs through to April 23rd, 2014
art: concept
13 rue des arquebusiers
75003 Paris
France
