Jean-Luc Blanc was born in 1965 in Nice. He lives and works in Paris. The matrix of Jean-Luc Blanc’s artistic project is articulated around an unalterable procedure that gives his works their ambiguous character. Like his drawings, the paintings he has made since the year 2000 are based on a practice of reappropriation. First, the artist collects a corpus of images found from different visual sources (cinema, magazines, press articles, postcards, adverts or lately Serge Diakonoff’s face paintings). He then repaints these patterns on a large canvas by isolating them.

Much as Picabia remained faithful to the photographs from which he was inspired, J.-L. Blanc reloads and re-presents them: “My passion leads me to these already established images that I then organize in a very disparate way to find them another breath, another voice.” The cinematographic aspect of his works allows him to create his own language: like a filmmaker, he reframes his subjects, most often in a close-up. For example, the portrait of a young man in a turtleneck jumper from an advertisement for a bank in the 1970s is completely reworked to give it an atmosphere other than that of the original image. By adding dark circles to the face of this man, the painter gives him a vampiric dimension, referring, among other things, to the aesthetics of German Expressionist films. In this way, the canvases act on the viewer just as J.-L. Blanc needs the images to act upon him. These are first and foremost gazes – we could almost say camera-gazes – that call out to us and fix us. So close and yet so far…
J.L. Blanc’s work highlights the tension between a perfectly mastered technique and the enigmatic character that this representation sends back to the viewer. But don’t we recognize images we have already seen, even if we can’t manage to clearly identify them?

The apparent simplicity of the sketches and the banality of the people in his portraits do not capture the long process of maturing that brought them to life. Elsewhere, an indescribable universe conveys another meaning whose traces are parsimoniously revealed. These scattered elements of fiction progressively build up a set of troublingly charismatic characters who reveal a strange banality. In J.-L. Blanc there is thus a “secret to reveal behind each image”. And it’s up to the viewer to let themselves get carried away in the mind and language games.

Galerie Art : Concept

Paris

Busan Biennial

Busan

Nice

Köln

Art Cologne

São Paulo

Vermelho

London

Modern Art

Amsterdam

Fons Welters

Jousse Entreprise

New York City

Max Protetch Gallery

Andrea Rosen

Galerie Buchholz

Centre Pompidou

Bordeaux

Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA

Frankfurt am Main

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Palais De Tokyo

Grand Palais

Brétigny-sur-Orge

CAC Brétigny

Milan

Padiglione D'Arte Contemporanea (Pac)

Annemasse

Villa Du Parc

Rotterdam

Witte De With Center For Contemporary Art

Capc Musée D'Art Contemporain De Bordeaux

Villa Arson

Marseille

Frac Sud - Cité de l'art contemporain

Musée D'Art Moderne Et D'Art Contemporain (Mamac)

Villeurbanne

Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes

Sotteville-Lès-Rouen

Frac Normandie Rouen

Jean-Luc Blanc

Sans titre

Tell me more

Bouvard et Pécuchet

La narratrice

Fireman