At the end of this morning on the island, I walk within my own painting, among the lava blocks of varying sizes, from the largest to the tiniest dust of lava playing with the winter wind and sun on the beach. To my great delight, I find myself witnessing these ancestral games of sand and wind. A sentence by Philippe Jacottet punctuates this moment: “It is not I, it is the wind that passes through me.” But it is not only the wind that passes through me this morning—unless it carries with it everything I have lived, seen, felt, loved, and hated. The slightest detail flaring up, invisible after a few seconds and yet carried by the wind, finds itself multiplied across the surface of the canvas. Not only on the surface, but within the canvas itself, between the transparency and opacity of the materials that are mine: hair, fur, ashes, sawdust, dust...
Upon returning from Lanzarote, the period of enforced confinement soon followed.
This almost magical confinement offered me external silence and optimal concentration, allowing me to lay on canvas all the sensations filtered and naturally retained.
The vineyards, the fires, the traces of insects—alive or dead—on the sand, the arrested moment of a fusion, of a lava flow reaching the sea, the impacts of petrified boulders marking the landscape, and the slow reconquest of fragile life over deadly layers—all of this lives within me. The works from this period joined their twin sisters, those created before the trip to Lanzarote.
From a microscopic world encountered on the northeastern beaches near Punta del Palo or Caleta del Monte Blanco, I created upon my return an entire macroscopic world. Every tiny detail seen, lived, digested found its way onto the canvas, using the same light materials the wind could carry with it or leave to me so that I might stop them in turn—these volatile materials so precious to me—petrified by an immense pictorial necessity, fixed forever in a bed of glue for one sole purpose: Living volcano.
Jean-Jacques Dournon
Spring 2020
Exhibition: from Saturday, October 7 to October 28, 2023
Galerie Le Coin des Arts – Le Marais
53, rue de Turenne, Paris 3rd
Tel.: 09 52 29 01 82 – info@lecoindesarts.com
Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Image: DD No. 593, On the Beach, Lanzarote, acrylic, sawdust, hair, ash on canvas, 136 x 130 cm, 2020 (detail)
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Two galleries in Paris
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