PEINTURE NOUVELLE

JEAN FAUCHEUR

Exhibition from November 26th to January 17th 2012

“The impressionist of the depth of field”

Founding figure of Urban Art - one remembers of the Ripoulin Brothers, alumni association of the "arts déco" , who, between 1984 and 1988, streamed their graphic pastings in Paris streets, then in those of New York City -Jean Faucheur dedicated himself later, until 2002, to sculpture, painting and photography.

Since a decade, this pioneer of group experiences felt the need to return to a more personal manner by constraining himself to a studio work, i.e. paradoxically within and out of the walls. Street requires a quickness of progress which forbids any right to error but lets imagination dilate in a more free liberty of the frame. Studio grants a freedom and the ease to make but keeps in confinement, incites to gain in profoundness what one looses in surface.

Such a discipline is lived by Jean Faucheur as one more challenge sent to his need to renew himself while preserving what he loves in street art : the energy in the script and the direct relationship with the public. Meanwhile he remains faithful to his lifelong tool: the spray which allows to graze the surface without ever touch it, limits the power of the motion, lays open to undulations of the course, such as glimpses of the unexpected, opening on the most unconscious perspectives of creation. Further advantage, the distance imposed by the use of this technique adds fuel to the fire of the enticement terms existing between the creator and his work.

For this perpetual innovator, why, then, not take advantage of this experience in also catching the image and the sound, commodities of the modernity? Yet, in his videos such as Jelly Fish, lighting effects modulated ectoplasmic shapes at the music’s dictation or, such as Images animées, the monotonous motion of the metro mixed the colours of the trains and of the underground stations at the tempo of a deafening noise of engine and rails.

In this exhibition, Jean Faucheur goes further: he uses the kinetic genius of the audiovisual as a tool of the very making of the work.
On these faces captured as pixels, colour unperceivably comes and adds itself, by small touches deepening into a kind of travelling before the proposed work. Different pictures then emerge which, far from scrambling the lineaments of the characters, slowly unveil their essence behind the indiscreet decency of a frosted glass. The resulting blur comes to exceed the surprising details in the clinical representation of photography. In the same idea, bodies get rid of their lascivious nudity or their unprovided banality, thus steeping in a molecular universe, multicoloured bubbles which remind us our atomic origin.

Thus goes the artist’s motion which, without cease, does pioneer work, superposes, changes the perspective, without himself too much knowing what he is to discover. It suggests that our look deceives us on what it guesses it sees. Thus is ad infinitum renewed the bearing of an approach which pulls some more secret from its subject matter as that the artist lays his colour. Jean Faucheur ends up by overcoming the sometimes reducing realism of photography in order to let his bomb conquer our imagination. He forces us to search in his canvas to go beyond what it shows or let feel. Of Auguste Renoir, he has kept the static evocation power of the foreground, of his son Jean, the cineaste; he has remembered the tremendous dynamic of the depth of field of which he offers an impressionist version.

ADDICT Galerie offers for the first time a significant declension of Jean Faucheur’s pictorial work which reveals his talent in breach and thus enhances his innovator’s place.