In Jean-Charles Blais’s work the human form emerges to the eye, profound and silent but narrating a story. To be explored at Catherine Issert’s gallery until 2 July.
Born in Nantes in 1956, Jean-Charles Blais caught the art world’s attention from the early Eighties with his paintings on torn-down posters. Unlike post-war poster artists such as Raymond Hains and Jacques de la Villeglé, past masters in the art of décollage, Blais used these printed papers as the material means to trigger a narrative through the appearance of a form either summarily sketched or on the contrary fully constructed. Catherine Issert’s gallery in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, which has represented Blais since 1983, presently has an exhibition of some 15 of his recent works showing for the first time; they depict the human form face on, from the back or in three-quarter profile. Through persistence and evanescence, the artist plays with the boundaries of figure and composition.
The painting process
Inhabiting the studio as a laboratory, Jean-Charles Blais has allowed himself to be guided by media and procedure, in the course of his career passing seamlessly from pictures to pieces resembling sewing patterns, photography and digital art. He has made a name for himself too in the urban landscape, creating a colourful poster décor for the refurbishment of the Assemblée Nationale metro station in Paris in 1990 and an installation for Jean Nouvel’s 100 Eleventh Avenue building in New York in 2010. Whatever the field of experimentation, Blais’s practice has always been imbued with the same preoccupations: the body and its portrayal, fragmentation, positive and negative, absence. His references come from a broad historical gamut that ranges from Neapolitan working-class ex-votos to Malevich. Inspirations he has translated into a process alternating figuration and de-figuration, one that derives its full meaning from the spatial and material aspects of his work.
Saint-Paul-de-Vence
2 route des Serres,
Tél. 04 93 32 96 92
www.galerie-issert.com
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