4 Musee Vitry pageArsenal Soissons pageChristian Jaccard is a French visual artist of Swiss origin, born in Fontenay-sous-Bois (France) in 1939.

The fire, the source of life and light, is the constituent tool of Christian Jaccard 'satiric' practice which associates the ignition with the phenomenon of the painting. The approach of Christian Jaccard bases itself on a philosophy, similar to esotericism.

In the practice of combustion, he associates a 'material' of ritual and primitive order. The creation by, and in, the fire becomes the inescapable passage of a transmutation of the material, the result of which is unpredictable and engenders a more or less abstracted representation.

His work is organized around two periods by specifying its searches on tracks, the combustion, the folding, the calcination or the plaiting, namely by the the use of knots which replace the brush to leave their imprints on the painting, and employing the practice of combustion which generates new sets: calcined unknown persons, trophies, burned painting, ...

In both cases, he uses a well defined method; in each of its gestures, his act is exercised with rigor, without thoughtlessness, without casualness, conceptualized and checked. This fascination for the imprint finds itself in all Jaccard's work: he questions traditional pictorial and sculptural practices from pigments and from fire on free painting as well as on knots. These two directions join because the ropes which serve to make knots find themselves in the process of creation of the imprints of his paintings.

Since the 2000s, Jaccard has often working in outdoor spaces, such as former industrial sites, as well as in churches or chapels. The problem of the picture becomes emancipated without denying its origins. To him, the studio is a nomadic and short-lived laboratory. The short-lived picture is born by the ignition in contact with the place, it becomes by its flows a metaphor of the drives of the living. He juxtaposes his work to the memory of the place and to any indication of tracks of life. The short-lived paintings, the works realized in situ, consist of hundreds of shadows of soot resulting from the combustion of a multiplicity of lines of thermal frost placed on walls. Of this incandescent, fulminant, brilliant phase, remains the hypnotic effect of the repetition of the unstable shadows of soot, which establishes a diagram of energy and a palpitating rhythm.

On 25th September 2014, Jaccard will present Tableaux Ephémères at the Centre Pompidou in Paris: http://goo.gl/0gbu2k

This artist has received the kind support of PSA Insurance Ltd. for their Mdina Biennale project.


Mdina Biennale Venues