Déboussolé est le mot exact Jean Claracq
Jean Claracq: Surfaces and Details
“Le plastique en rabat, c'est une substance ménagère. C'est la première matière magique qui consente au prosaïsme ; mais c'est précisément parce que ce prosaïsme lui est une raison triomphante d'exister : pour la première fois, l'artifice vise au commun, non au rare”. [1]
– Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957
Perhaps no transformation in the history of painting has been more radical than the shift in perspective from viewing painting as a testament to the pact between the painter and reality to viewing it as a testament to the pact between the painter and the world of things. Once painting became an object, it was a one-way path toward ready-made and conceptual art, leaving painting with the freedom to be nothing but surface. Jean Claracq retraces this path, sometimes as a parody and sometimes as an allegory. In fact, his painting engages most directly with the world of objects: There is no Life and Death, for example, depicts an empty plastic bottle floating in a stream, while Preorder Now shows a billboardsuspended in the city. Both are defined by their respective surfaces: contentless packaging in the former and paper glued onto a support in the latter. These works reflect on the essence of painting, the world of appearances, and disposable images. They are projected into other pieces, such as Camera Eats First and Sticker. In an equally metalinguisticmanner, these works comment on desire, consumption, and disposal. They recognize a kind of signifying coming-to-be: a hollow linguistic materiality at the disposal of a lost meaning.
In Jean Claraq's painting, the mental process that constitutes a reflection on the emptying of the signifier coincides with the process present in the 16th-century Flemish object studies, "still lifes" in English. The correspondence between nature/life and death/paralysis brings to the fore an idea of suspended time, one frequently challenged by variouspainters who each knew, in their own way, how to infuse elements of the passage of a cruel time, one that forgives nothing and corrodes everything. This apparent slowness explains the intensity of the unsettling reflection on the certainty of death and the reduction of the body to a state of disappearance. This depth of thought possibly overwhelmsthe young man sitting at the edge of the bed, who seems to be the counterpart to Hans Memling's painting of the dancing skeleton reproduced on the bed. The same depth emanates from Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld, depicting a young man seated on a train bench. This pose evokes the classic depiction of melancholy, which Albrecht Dürer transformed into a symbol in his 1514 engraving, Melencolia I. Claracq gives this painting the same title as Jan Brueghel the Younger's 1630 work, which depicts Aeneas's famous catabasis (descent into the underworld), as narrated in Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid. In both cases, reflection - the slowing of time - reflects the subject's deep immersion in hisown consciousness. It is a speculation about destiny, both metaphorical and real (in one of the paintings, there is a clear suggestion of a reflection on the mirrored surface of the train poster). This speculation has no end other than death.
Ultimately, this expanded dimension of still life as a subject for meditation on death (memento mori) brings us back to There is no Life and Death and Preorder Now. Unlike their respective subjects of discussion, the references in these works are anything but superficial. The former evokes John Everett Millais's masterpiece depicting the tragic death of Ophelia, who, according to the famous scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet, drowned in a river after going mad. The latter, less direct work shows two male figures, one naked , the other half-naked, surrounded by Roman sarcophagi. At first glance, one recognizes a familiarity in them guaranteed by the same liminal condition of being suspended above the ground, which appears in Into the Mall, depicting a man on scaffolding painting an immense mural of a muscular, half-naked male figure, and in Panneau de Droite, portraying handsome young men floating in crystal-clear waters. However, both confront death not as a magical-religious event but as a material phenomenon: the emptying of the bodily vessel. The plastic bottle is just as hollow as the sarcophagi, which are now reduced to the thingness that defines them a priori.
Jean Claracq seems to constantly gather packaging, skins, and outer layers, much like someone who collects candy wrappers, stickers, or clothes. He is interested in studying shells, masks, avatars - the malleable substances of identity. His painting effortlessly moves from representation to the thing itself (and vice versa), revealing an object to the same extent that it establishes itself in the world. With few exceptions, their dimensions vary from 10 to 20 centimeters, fostering intimacy and all that it entails: the closeness of the body, the exchange of heat, and the act of holding onto something, as if keeping a detail of the world close at hand. In Le Détail, Daniel Arasse proposed a close-up history of painting. Confronted with Jean Claracq's paintings, the question arises in almost inverted form: how might one conceive of a history of painting that is itself the secret scale of a detail?
– Renato Menezes, art historian and curator
[1] “Plastic has climbed down, it is a household material. It is the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic. But it is precisely because this prosaic character is a triumphant reason for its existence: for the first time, artifice aims at something common, not rare.”