Jean-Luc Blanc
« I spend more time collecting, cutting and classifying images than painting them, » explains the artist, collector and archivist of printed images, press, cinema, postcards. He calls them « photograms », and therefore considers them both as units or entities and as fragments of a continuum, a continent of memory and imagination – the very matrix of his art, painting and drawings. Jean-Luc Blanc has a passion for images, in a meticulous, if not obsessive, way, which he concretizes in a daily quasi-mechanical work.
His painting is inhabited, if not haunted. The artist most often paints characters (but not only) who embody as much as they compose a particular universe. These figures, familiar though distant, seem to belong to an indefinite, troubled interzone world where Eros and Thanatos define the rules of a game in which they would be prisoners. We meet many full-frame faces, looks, make-up eyes, expressions and marked postures, a whole iconography of exaggerated artifice. Artifice rhymes with sacrifice. But aren’t manufactured representations, commercial or fictional, always based on fatal scenarios, on a sacrifice of people to lives other than their own? Blanc explores this sacrificial dimension of the images – which is drunkenness, vertigo. This is one of the great themes of cinema that the painter tirelessly examines. However, painting, a ductile and alchemical material, makes it possible, like no other medium, to « stretch the image », according to its own terms, its temporality and its substance, to carry out magical transubstantiations.
On December 5, Jean Luc Blanc will present his Traumatic Encyclopedia, a department of his archive and ongoing work, and will show us, in a way, how the painter sets in motion buried and forgotten images. « You forget me, I hold you »: that’s how the Image works.
Biography of Jean Luc Blanc
Solo shows
2014 : faux-roman visage, Art : Concept, Paris/FR.
2009 : Jean-Luc Blanc, Opera Rock, CAPC, Bordeaux/FR (curator: Alexis Vaillant).
2004 : Mamco, Genève/CH.
Group shows
2018 : Biennale de Gwangju, Gwangju, Korea; Michael On The Wall, Grand Palais, Paris (November).
2017 : Jean Luc Blanc, Clément Rodzielski, Passage du Pinceau, Paris/FR.
2015 : La Femme de trente ans, Art:Concept, Paris/FR (curator: Caroline Soyez-Petithomme), (un mural, des tableaux), Frac Île-de-France, Paris/FR.
2014 : The Crime was Almost Perfect, Witte de With Center for Contempoary Art, Rotterdam & PAC, Milan/IT (curator : Cristina Ricupero).
2013 : Les Pléiades, Abattoirs, Toulouse/FR; Suspicious Minds, Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo/BR (curator: Cristina Ricupero).
2012 : Une chaînette relie toutes les pendeloques et forme le corps principal de l’objet, Main d’Oeuvre, Saint Ouen/FR.
2011 : Sociétés Secrètes, CAPC, Bordeaux/FR et Secret Societies, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt/DE.
2009 : Memento Mori (jusqu’à ce que la mort nous rassemble…), Musée d’Evreux/FR (curator : FRAC Haute-Normandie).
2008 : Sphinxx, Modern Art, London/UK (curator: Alexis Vaillant).
2006 : Le voyage intérieur, Espace Electra, Paris/FR (curators : Alexis Vaillant & Alex Farquarson).
2005 : Enchanté château, Château d’Arenthon, Fondation Salomon, Alex/FR; The 15 minute show, galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam/N.
2004 : De leur temps collections privées françaises, Tourcoing/FR • Is one thing better than another, Aurel Scheibler Gallery, Cologne/DE.
Turpentine is a fanzine published since 2013 by Jean-Luc Blanc, Mimosa Echard, Jonathan Martin, and their guests. In 2018, Turpentine organized and participated in events at DOC, Art : Concept, Goton (Paris); Salzburger Kunstverein, and Beeler Gallery (CCAD Columbus).
