JEAN-PAUL MONTANGE
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Born in 1946, Jean-Paul Montange studied at Les Ateliers du Louvre. His interest tends towards traditional as well as sacred art. Jean-Paul Montange has investigated the relation between forms, color, and energy for more than 30 years, through many voyages and encounters.
The luminosity of his colors, the spontaneous equilibrium of his composition, his vivid and rigorous design, all burst forth across his art with an irresistible regenerative energy. A painter of cosmic movements, Jean-Paul Montange brings us back to the original serenity. Nathalie Weinryb,
Arts Program Principales expositions : 1984 - Institut Audiovisuel
de Paris, Paris Commandes Sociétés 1986 - Lincoln, Société
de Recrutement |
Although the abstraction of his lyricism places Jean-Paul Montange in the current of modern art, his roots as an artist extend back much further in time. They must be sought in that noble line of painters for whom the imagination, breaking through the illusory shell of the quotidian, was able to reveal itself for what is really is: a fantastic and overwhelming miracle. For this visionary company of painters the onset of a dream was nothing more than a sure step towards a reality that, compared to what is normally called Real Life, remains even today something more authentic, more convincing, maybe even more objective. One can cite as examples of this lineage such figures as Jérôme Bosch, William Turner, William Blake, and Salvador Dali. With their grand style these painters and their like traced the entire history of painting since the Renaissance. They transcribed onto their canvases all the brazen inanity of the world merely by painting the tragedy of our simple existence - that hallucination as unreal as a ghost and as fleeting as a sunrise. As for Jean-Paul Montange himself, he plunges directly, corporeally into the whirlwind of energies which presides over our universe, making us feel that any attempt to infix their forms is but the illusory desire of mental comfort. He captures these energies, he travels through them, he traces their course with his hands; and his sole guide in this voyage to the heart of forms is a consummate rhythm of gesture which, at the far end of his arm, is nothing less than the external manifestation of the currents flowing and throbbing within himself. This is why, at first glance, his art moves us by its power to destabilize our corporal perceptions; in the moment of creation his body, right down to its very fibers, is impeccably and implacably present in his work. And we gradually become sensitive to the eruptions of color, the warmth of the yellows, the magnificence of the golds, for it is then that we touch something that, in Modern Art, should no longer carry a name but that was once called Beauty. Through the particular acrylics he employs, Jean Paul Montange achieves a transparency of surface difficult to attain using the techniques of contemporary oil painting. A lucent light, accumulated by the successive scraping and smoothing of numerous layers of paint, shines forth into the foreground of his paintings thanks to a special preparation of the canvases, the fine grain of which serves to avoid any facile effects of refraction. Thus the color blue, traditionally symbolic of virginity, can by his brush attain such translucence that at certain times his canvases evoke the art of stained-glass windows. His method of execution, which necessitates total bodily involvement, may call to mind Action Painting, and particularly its most famous exponent, Jackson Pollock. But the intensity of his light and the density of his colors leave no doubt as to Montange's intent: more than gestural, his work arises from an adhesion to the cosmic vibration whose spiraling imprint startles us with the revelation of our own vital energies. Jean-Paul Montange reaches towards that ultimate transparency in which, existing without sensibility but in pure sensation, the world lives and dies in the same instant. It is up to us, standing in front of his canvases, to merge with this fluidity which gives body to space and runs us out beyond the impermanence of forms - to that unique point from which everything springs. Christian Gilloux,
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