Jean-Claude Bélégou Chimeras : LES BUCOLIQUES (Bucolicon) 2018/2020

 

 

Anonymous and familiar landscapes, fragments of nature, or of what takes its place, because if nature is what is born, develops and dies spontaneously, outside the intervention, even remote from man, it must be admitted that 'it no longer exists in its pure state since a very long time.
Rarely a horizon, sometimes a corner of the blue of the sky. Fragments, seizures, cuts.
No nostalgia. point of ecology.
The pleasure of entering into the material, framing, cutting, freezing, composing, in short, playing with shapes, shadows and light.
As Malraux (the imaginary museum) remarked, a painter who paints landscapes, before being a man who is interested in nature is someone who is interested in paintings. Memories of Le Gray, Corot, Courbet, Cézanne ...
Photographing the landscape as a body, and a body as a landscape. To seize the flesh.
Cross the brambles, venture on muddy bottoms, climb the paths.
There is in doing so a real pleasure, a breath, a feeling of freedom, to wander, far from the center of civilizations, among these vegetation, grasses, foliage, meadows, water, rocks and earth. Like a teenager running away, deserting the boredom of lessons, losing himself on the quays of a port.
But "making landscapes" does not consist either in walking around while waiting for "the beautiful image" to emerge in front of you, than "making a nude" would consist of an exercise in pleasure.
The image, it is necessary to create it from scratch, to force it to emerge, and to do battle with the real, always too there.
Make the outside and the inside coincide, the real and the imaginary.

Colors digital, print with archival inks 60 x 60 cm printed by the artist, limited editions, delivered matted, numbered and signed..