Jean Daviot

Jean Daviot is a French contemporary artist born in Digne on February 20, 1962. He went to the art school at the Villa Arson in Nice and lives and works in Paris. Jean Daviot distinguishes himself by the exploitation of various ways of intervention: video, photography, painting, but also actions in the landscape or sonorous works. In 1984, he creates a fictional character: the artist Walter Pinkrops. From 1994, he realizes "Ombrographies" by taking imprints of faces and hands in photocopy and by transferring these traces onto the white canvas. Since 1999, he draws the outline of people coming to his workshop: "The visitors of the self". In these paintings, the body and its shadow join in the same shape: "The shape of the body is the body of the shape". In "Silences," he questions the language of the hands: a universal language of symbols. In "Srevne", presented at "La force de l'art" in 2006 in the Grand Palais in Paris, he made his voice heard at the place, inside out and upside down backwards. He sculpts the language as an object, which then becomes an off-voice reflection of the palimpsest. "L'écart des mots" are photographs where he inserts words in landscapes, skies, cities, playing on their signifieds and signifiers. With "Vherbe" he really makes words grow in the landscape, words in letters of grass which can measure several hundred meters: "MEmoiRE" near the prehistoric cave of Pech-Merle, "ImaGinE" at the foundation Genshagen in Berlin, or "Lieu et lien" in front of the Palais du Pharo in Marseille. Since 1995, Jean Daviot creates digital paintings, "Ecritures de lumières", where he uses a video camera as a brush. The procedure is simple, in appearance: the camera slows down, he heads it towards planets emitting or reflecting light, the sun,Venus, Jupiter,the moon, or towards cities at night and lets, by the movement of his hand, the light deposit itself on the support.It is the very light which deposits itself in bursts of color, streams of oscillations and of flow on the screen, the canvas, the wall. A work that Marc-Alain Ouaknin calls "The sky at his fingertips", title of a book he wrote on the artist. In his "Bocca del mondo", Jean Daviot makes huge jars speak and dialogue, by night they transform into planets. In a recent work in 2013, "en visage le paysage", points of view on places appear through the contour of his face made of stone or metal.