JÉRÉMIE PAUL
Jérémie Paul’s work is all about painting from tinted silks to liberally covered and shredded books, including watercolours and paintings on canvases. The artist encourages us to explore painting beyond its traditional context, beyond its sometimes authoritarian and fixed nature. His mannered and brutal painting is alive, tumultuous and sensual, splashing, running, crossing, covering, moving, vibrating and staining. Drawing on gestural, sensory, formal and material experiments it is considered a journey, a long walk full of pleasant and disturbing surprises, reiterating our relationship with its history and postures.
Jérémie Paul resists and repels definitions, constraints and preconceived ideas with a lightness that is appealing and astounding. His painting is odd, nonstandard, indefinable and impenetrable. It requires effort. In this sense, Jérémie Paul conceives the exhibition like a decor or landscape where the viewer partakes. Their body – if they decide to take part –is linked choreographically to the works. They have to lean, circumnavigate, look down on, and pass between, under and through. One work may be concealing another.
So we consequently need to familiarise ourselves with the landscape so as to perceive its magnanimity and complexity. Our senses are also called upon: a sound loop gives rhythm to the walk; flowers and other plant components appeal to our sense of smell; the silk caresses us as we move, the vivid and pure colours recall the colours of sweets or ice cream. As the walk progresses, the works are like outbursts challenging and disrupting aspects and routines. They entice us to search for signs, gestures and relationships between colours, lights and images that together form a composition, the structure of a story; a story with multiple beginnings and seemingly endless tales. The tales are populated with enigmatic objects: “small toys” made from modelling clay on a shelf, a damaged and elegant screen, bunches of flowers, books roughly stapled to the wall and swathes of silk floating in space.
Swaying, intense, poetic and insolent thinking shapes the story full of unexpected combinations told by Jérémie Paul. He rejects immediate comprehension; the command of the work of art and the exhibition are crippled. He prefers organic and unpredictable over stability. His response to decorum is violence and playfulness. Movement powers his work imbued with soft and overpowering energy. Disturbances are dispensed fragment by fragment, provoking a break with the norm.
Julie Crenn
