Jean-Marie Blanchet
Born in 1970
Lives and works in Villeneuve-sur-Lot
“One of the most striking characteristics of the objects Jean-Marie Blanchet creates is the duplicity of their nature (painting or object) – concrete objects or figurations of a more general reality. This duplicity is most visible in the permanent back-and-forth motion that animates him, from real to fake (or “real/fake”, as they say for passports) and backward and forward between art, its history, what came out of it and what will return to it…
[…] Primary colours were the fundamental “bricks” of abstract art, the raw material of painting. Jean-Marie Blanchet takes these “bricks” from the colour charts of industrial paint companies in the same way he selects his other basic materials (whether mediums for his own work or the ones he depicts). Says the artist, “abstraction is now taken for granted and any abstract painting becomes déjà vu. In light of this situation, I felt that using reality as a starting point might be a solution to break away from the idea of a formal invention complete with an attention for painting and for the gesture as a means.
[…] This is why the dividing line between figuration and abstraction no longer exists, instead replaced by a line between two artistic attitudes: one of these consists in considering everything as identical and unchanging (“From Lascaux to Grand Louvre”, “From Altamira to Jackson Pollock” in its extremist version, and since the late 19th century in its progressive version), and the other, followed by Jean-Marie Blanchet, is an ethical rather than aesthetic attitude that consists in overcoming the hypocrisy of thinking that the world hasn’t changed since the avant-gardes and in taking account of today’s historicity.
Text (excerpt) by Vincent Pécoil, 2015
Documents d'artistes Nouvelle-Aquitaine commission