Galerie Lara Vincy.

“We are all the more apt to criticize an art form that we have practiced it ourselves”
Pierre Reverdy, Le livre de mon bord (1948)


Youri Vincy is happy to announce the first solo exhibition by Jacques Charlier “Paintings of all kinds” in the Galerie Lara Vincy, as an echo of the exhibition Jacques Charlier Une rétrospective, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, La Panacée, Montpellier, from 14 October, 2017 through 14 January, 2018.

On that occasion, there will be shown a selection of paintings from the years 2000-2017, coming from various series: “Le parcours de l’art”, a freeze-frame on the legs of a man walking in space on a blue sky background above a green field, dotted with threatening erectile points. Or else those of comic-strip images, in the manner of Lichtenstein, in which the text in the bubbles has been re-thought by Charlier, ho is here trying to disturb our eye and our mind to lead us directly into the field of art criticism. He employs the same process in the series Les fessées with “Predictive art”, a genre scene with a character drowning another in a kitchen sink, to which the artist has added in capital letters some remarks with evocative titles: “Curator with not much brain”, “Official experts with many labels”, “Unit of visual value”…

Another example with the series of  Peintures réparées, paintings in diptychs, with on the one hand a torn canvas recalling Fontana (before) and on the other, the same canvas after being repaired with a sewing thread (after) and its adjoining video, a filmed demonstration indicating the procedure needed to repair them ourselves.  The artist invites us, with humor and derision, to (re)discover the history of art, its market, its movements, its actors, etc.  His critical mind with its corrosive accents is everywhere present and his absolute mastery of the painterly techniques allows us, at least in appearance, to approach art as closely as possible, but with an evermore disconcerted   eye, thanks to his conceptual telescoping and its permanent disruptions. His fields of experimentations are covered by a multitude of visual proposals: photos, comic strips, videos, drawings, paintings… The artist does not spare any style nor any current, logical for Charlier, who insists that he does not want to belong to any of them, we can therefore ask ourselves if he does not master them all simultaneously?  But, at the same time, we notice that with him, since his works related to the STP, during the sixties until his most recent paintings, that his is an art of attitude, borrowings from many detours and by-ways, which often take the shape of a parodic self-referential form of art in itself.

A monographic catalogue, “Un art sans identité”, is published by La Panacée with the participation of the Galerie Lara Vincy on the occasion of two other exhibitions: the one mentioned above and Jacques Charlier Peintures non identifiées, Galerie Aperto, Montpellier, from October 14 through November 4, 2017.

Translated in English by Ann Cremin, 2017