Jean-Jacques Laurent

Jean-Jacques Laurent was born in Limoges in 1943. He lives and works in Vallauris, where his family came to settle when he still was a child. Born of a circle of potters and artists, he has been familial with all the myths of modern art which memories still haunt the South of France, and mixed with such key figures as Prévert or Picasso.
Out of this familiarity, Jean-Jacques Laurent got more violence than softness in his relations with art. He paints as one struggles, with roughness, deliberately misusing matters and tools, exploring reprocessed supports, trying to inscribe his traces less in a private discussion with the great references of the history of art than in a conversation with all the lives that settle in our wastes.
The works of Jean-Jacques Laurent fit smugly to the mishaps of the world, they take shape respecting the poor shapes that mark the spaces he invests, they are born - or gradually rise, as it is said of a mist - from a slow, long, meditative and ruminating confrontation between the painter and the supports, the marks, the spots, the matters, the colourings. The canvas or the paper are pieces of the world : the artist who stands there (for he stands there or plants himself there, as one does on a territory being discovered, a territory on the verge of being explored, appropriated, altered) reads them, interprets them, gives meaning to them.

From this impact between the artist and these pieces of the world surge new pieces of the world (pieces of a new world?) rich with toned-down colours, diffusions and ruptures : they are peopled with figures of vaguely feminine appearance and wich, no doubt, are less images of the women than that of the painting, the dreadful mistress…

Raphaël Monticelli - 1998