JEAN-PIERRE PINCEMIN

“My own story with painting is loving to paint, not knowing how to paint, inventing means to paint, and, then, rather quickly being able to call myself a Western painter.”

Jean-Pierre Pincemin became a painter at age 23. He gave up his job as a factory metal turner. His teachers: passion and the urge to create. From 1968 to 1973, Jean-Pierre Pincemin tried his hand at glued squares. First, the canvas was dipped in a tub of paint. Next, it was cut up and assembled in irregular geometric figures, squares, and rectangles.

By 1971, Jean-Pierre Pincemin had joined the Supports/Surfacesmovement, which sprang up in the late 1960s. This movement, inspired by Matisse’s cut-outs, was situated close in time to another new abstract movement in the USA and in France, Hard Edge painting, with the likes of Simon Hantaï and Claude Viallat. The concept behind this movement was a focus on the physical reality of the painting.

At the end of the 1990s, Jean Pierre Pincemin decided to junk everything but assimilate everything. This meant every style, every support, every technique, every genre. When arthritis set in, Pincemin turned to producing polychrome sculptures in his image, assemblages of painted scraps of wood stapled together.

His themes in his work have ranged from trees, religious topics, war scenes, the erotic, and also portraiture. Jean Pierre Pincemin became the most audacious of technicians, mixing oil with or without tar, and using other very personal mixtures. His favoured canvas, paper, and also photographic posters as supports.

 Jean-Pierre Pincemin was born in France, in 1944. He started out as a factory mechanic. His first visit to the Louvre Museum fire a passion for painting. After a period as an art critic, he switched to creating his own paintings and sculptures and had his first showing in 1968.

These works were the result of research that was light years from traditional brush work. It involved folding, using brick imprints, meshes, and working with canvas as a new material. By 1971, Jean-Pierre Pincemin had joined the rather recently created Supports/Surfaces movement. Throughout his corpus of work, Pincemin vacillated from abstraction to figuration.