Over the last three months, the CAPC contemporary art museum in Bordeaux has played host to the French artist Jean-Luc Blanc, organising a vast retrospective of his work.

Born in 1965 in Nice, Jean-Luc Blanc started his artistic career by drawing, gradually venturing towards painting. This picture-lover takes constant inspiration from the numerous media that our society puts forward, gleaning images from magazines, newspapers, postcards, and films. After a frenzied period of collecting and accumulation, several pictures ‘impose’ themselves to Jean-Luc Blanc, and he selects these to paint. Transferring a small picture to a larger-sized painting allows the artist to give a second life to the image – he says himself that photography is an execution, painting a resuscitation. Giving pictures selected from our everyday life a new purpose, cancelling their first meaning, bringing anonymity to stars, conferring new-found glory on John Does – this is Jean-Luc Blanc’s game. With this somewhat simple and repetitive technique, the artist masterfully allows the spectator to come across a new image, free of its past, and open to interpretation. Discovering Jean-Luc Blanc’s work allows us to come to terms with our own personal way of looking at art.

Along with over two hundred of his paintings and drawings, forty-five other artists have been brought together by Jean-Luc Blanc and the Parisian curator Alexis Vaillant to be part of this retrospective.
Indeed, when invited to create a retrospective of his work, Jean-Luc Blanc couldn’t conceive his canvasses without the production of other artists, contemporary or historical, that have influenced him throughout his career. Add to that antiques and anonymous objects, artworks from the municipal museums of Bordeaux, and you have a fully blown ‘Opera Rock’, an eclectic collection of the desires and inspirations of Jean-Luc Blanc, set out in thirteen rooms of the second floor gallery of the CAPC.
Along with sound effects orchestrated by Mr. Learn, and the phantom of the French writer Marguerite Duras hanging over the exhibition, the CAPC has successfully managed to give you the feeling of entering into Jean-Luc Blanc’s mind and understanding his approach as an artist, his world of imagination and creation. This 3D version of his brain is characterised by a diversity of techniques, a medley of generations and nationalities, and a multiplicity of truths.

Works by Michel Blazy, paintings by Dan Attoe, bestial sculptures by Laurent Le Deunff, and photographs by Diane Arbus dialogue with installations by Vidya Gastaldon, hand-crafted objects by Shannon Bool, shotgun paintings by William Burroughs, videos by Brice Dellsperger and lithography by Odilon Redon. All of these accompany the enigmatic paintings of Jean-Luc Blanc, communicating as if old friends.
Portraits face abstract oil paintings, delicate porcelain ornaments sit side by side with ancient mummy hands, wooden silhouettes talk to metal-wire spiders… Almost three hundred artworks share the space of this exhibition, an original and quasi extensive portrayal of the thoughts of Jean-Luc Blanc, a way to understand his art differently and to combine backstage (the inspiration of the artist) with the stage itself (his own production), symbolised here by the tall black screens (as if in a theatre) that accompany the visitor the further he ventures into the exhibition.

Let yourself be drawn into this artist’s space – you won’t be disappointed.

Jean-Luc Blanc, Opera Rock
From the 25th of March to the 14th of June 2009
CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France

Created by Alice Cavender On 06/04/09 At 03:20 PM

My earliest recollections are of an elaborate grate that covered an air shaft in the house where I was raised in Brooklyn. The pattern of swirls-the positive and negative space-the completeness of the Victorian design captivated me. The vent went out into a back yard and because the brass plate so fascinated me, I created elaborate visual images in my mind that incorporated the polished plate, shadowy shaft and the leafy garden beyond. I sketched the grate and used black Crayola crayons to block out the negative space. One day, I discovered a way of looking at the plate and my sketches through the viewfinder of my Dad’s Kodak Brownie. It was magic! So began my passion for architectural elements that define and augment visual space and my desire to create own art from these masterworks of stone, metal, glass and wood.

As an adolescent, I began to discover and appreciate architectural details that adorn buildings in New York City. The early photographs that I took were purely to capture the visual. Each time I saw a flower carved in stone, an interlocking and intricate geometric design created by ironwork, an enchanting or fierce marble face over a doorway, I had to capture it on film. I would wait anxiously for the photographs to come back (this before my education of the darkroom and the infinite possibilities that chamber held) from the camera store. Opening those envelopes was an experience filled with all the wonder of childhood: the images of art poured forth. I cropped the artful architectural details to create my own art and frequently drew or painted elaborate illustrations from those photographs. Some of the drawings and paintings were taken from one architectural image; others combined several ornaments into one composition. While my contemporaries in art classes were studiously copying the works of the masters, I was replicating and interpreting in my own way the often unsung artists who had sculpted masterpieces that ornamented buildings right in my own neighborhood. I did not need to look in art books to find statues and paintings that were housed in European museums to find my inspiration: all I had to do was look around my Brooklyn street or take a subway to my personal Oz: Manhattan. The artworks were all around me on the buildings I passed every day.

As a photographer of details of architecture, I am still enthralled by the magnificent art and meticulous craft that went in to the creation of ornamentation of architecture in the past. When I plan a day of photographing architecture, likely as not, I will be amazed by the details that I discover-even now. Throughout my travels, I have photographed vine covered lampposts, grim faced gargoyles, beatific angels, elaborate serpentine designs and elegant art deco relief I first photograph some of the area in which the detail exists. For example, on a recent shoot, I found inspirational subjects in Grand Central Station. Before taking photographs of the details to which I was drawn, I took pictures of the entire building from numerous angles. I then isolated the details of architecture that I wished to photograph. I always work with natural light to emphasize the characteristics of the detail of architecture and the way in which it was initially created. After I am satisfied that I had enough photographs of the architectural detail, I shoot the surfaces of the detail and the surrounding area up close so that I can understand the original medium: sandstone, marble, brass, oak, et al. Later, I look at the images for hours before selecting the very best way in which I can preserve and enhance the art of the architectural detail. The images of Grand Central Station’s magnificent architectural details gave me weeks of creative energy and a passion to return there often to seek out new details and further refine the previous photographs I took there.

My quest in seeking out architectural details from which to create my own art has given me a profound appreciation of the beauty and history of New York. The art of creating art from art can be a humbling, yet empowering experience. I have, on the one hand, the great artists who created these marvels of ornamentation to live up to as I incorporate their art into my own. On the other hand, I am mentored by some of the best possible teachers. It was and continues to be a wonderful way to express myself through art.

Created by Ellen Fisch On 03/31/09 At 09:05 AM

Andrea Galvani, La Morte di Un’Immagine #9 (2006)

Have you ever witnessed something so beautiful it makes you angry? Something that makes you angry because it blows your entire scale, because it makes your delicate struggles for harmony ridiculous, petty, insignificant? This beauty that should elevate you, that should lift you up and carry you through the night, the beauty that is the inspiration and the core, is its exact opposite: smashing, unbearable, hard and cruel. It is a sunset that is just too magical, stars that shine too bright, or an event that seemed like the best of all performances. But what I mean is not perfection, it is beauty. It is not unnerving because it doesn’t allow you to access it, like the perfection of the stone. It is unnerving because it takes away your ability to judge it, or what’s worse, it’s a type of beauty that takes away your ability to include it into your appreciation of beauty. It makes it silly to think of art, to create, to go to galleries and museums, to scan art blogs and dwelve into poetry. It leaves you lonely, ridiculously hanging on to an outdated scale or desperately trying to adapt it to something that corresponds more to what Kant calls the sublime – although the problem is, it is not sublime, it is exactly what beauty could have been, had you not already developed a different scale altogether.
I’m lucky: I forget. The taste fades quite quickly from my mouth, the text evaporates from my head, and so does the view of the sea after the storm. It all starts again for me, and what is left is like a bookmark, a sign that says “this was good” and maybe, maybe manages to reproduce some sort of a sensation of a sensation I had when it happened.
And then, sometimes, if one focuses on this memory, the memory starts growing a new head, one that is nothing like the previous one. One that does not compete in these subjective beauty contests, one that is at once much more raw and more constructed, that uses your imagination but somehow fits it together with whatever surrounds you, adapting the memory into an idea, transforming it into this weird creature that still has the body of a horse, but instead of the head has grown a thick, black cloud. Of balloons.
Delicious.
Thank you Andrea Galvani.

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