"101" Painting

Joseph Jeantet is French artist based in London, represented at Galerie de l'Europe, Paris.

Fragility lies at the heart of my work. I focus on the use of volatile materials, most notably pure pigments, which turn the act of painting into a dialogue. This tension passes from one work to the next: each painting born from the previous one and making the next possible. A thread is formed, carrying within it a metamorphosis: a moment that is always present and always different. It is always that moment, endlessly.
I am drawn to transparency, light, and friable materials. My background as a filmmaker has shaped this approach and led me to place materiality at the center of my practice, a space where painting becomes vulnerable, attentive to all the forces that can influence it. I usually do not prepare colours, blending pigments directly on the surface, in pursuit of a gesture as primal as possible. Forms and textures reveal themselves as natural concretions and seem, in and of themselves, to possess an emotion.
My research certainly seeks to extend Surrealist inquiry, but I could not do what I do without the influence of the Italian Primitives. What overwhelms me is the desire to represent what cannot be known. Perhaps the need to paint reveals our incapacity to fully grasp our existence. Perhaps this is precisely why we paint. “What would we be without the aid of what does not exist?” This question, posed by Paul Valéry, echoes what I see in Giotto’s skies: that our representations are both impossible and necessary.