Jean-François Lacalmontie

Since the late 1970s, Jean-François Lacalmontie has been creating works that escape most traditional classifications. Initially, his work consisted of compulsively filling countless notebooks with thousands of signs on a daily basis. Sometimes evoking a kind of ideograms, neither entirely abstract nor completely figurative, these forms, these "things," these "objects" as he calls them, nourish a repertoire of shapes constituting his fundamental formal alphabet. Resembling a sort of writing without rational control, this process of distancing allows for an essentialization of the graphic gesture, whose haunting emergences question the conditions of the appearance of form.

Then comes the time for painting. Lacalmontie selects from the thousands of patterns revealed in his notebooks those that will become the subjects of his canvases. He cuts them out, copies them onto transparent film, and projects them using a video projector to work on them enlarged on canvas. Drawn with intense charcoal, these forms carry a great subtlety. Sensual and fragile, they participate in the profound elegance emanating from this work, as observed by the exhibition curator Olivier Kaeppelin, who has long since identified it.

Lacalmontie's forms emerge on extremely elaborate backgrounds, painting spaces, most often on canvases of various sizes, small, medium, and large. Sometimes these workspaces are directly transferred onto the wall or onto large tapestries of drawings on which a few paintings themselves laden with drawings or incongruous motifs, such as origamis, monochromes, or fragments of palettes, will be hung, thereby aiming at the impossible rationalization of representation.

What is a painting, what is its status, how to paint it, how to look at it? There is no narrative intention in the works of Jean-François Lacalmontie, no answer. A game with himself and with the viewer? But the worlds of plastic balances he offers us invite us to question classical and contemporary conceptions of the senseless language of painting. Here is a paradoxical, irrational, primitive work in some aspects, escaping time. Like free jazz, it is neither yesterday nor the moment but the sequence.