ART

Jacques Monory at L’Aspirateur

 

The exhibition of twenty paintings by Jacques Monory, produced between 1968 and 2012, is the third in succession at L’Aspirateur in Narbonne to document the Figuration Narrative movement originating in France in the 1960’s. The first exhibition, in 2013 was devoted to the work of Erro, the second in the Spring of this year to the work of Bernard Rancillac (see The HAT, April 2014).  Herve Telemaque, Peter Klasen and Richard Fromanger were other members of a movement motivated by a reaction to Lyrical Abstraction in Europe as Pop Art developed in response to Abstract Expressionism in the US.  Like the Pop Artists, Monory and his Figuration Narrative contemporaries drew on visual sources in popular culture and were critical of Pop for its failure to generate and engage in social and political discourse.

 

Monory’s paintings have a number of distinct and defining characteristics.  While his paintings are ‘figurative’, they are not realistic.  They are painted in monochrome, predominantly blue.  Monory grew up with low budget Hollywood ‘B’ movies, usually crime dramas, in which blue filters were used in ‘day for night’ shots and to create menace and uncertainty.  Film Noire was the name given to this film genre.  Monory’s blue is a device to deny realism, to create distance, to create doubt. It raises questions about the triangular relationship between the subject, the artist and the viewer and about the symbolic function of colour.  Monory’s paintings are ‘narrative’, but the story they tell is rarely disclosed.  It is Monory’s practice to take still photographs of films from the TV, freezing narrative moments and severing scenes from their narrative context.  The result is ambiguity.  Monory paints in series.  Each painting in each series is numbered.  Paintings in the series are not explorations of the same motif as with those of Monet and Cezanne.  They are developments of a theme in which the links are open to interpretation.  Monory’s paintings, like those of Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine, often incorporate found objects widening the corridor of uncertainty between reality and illusion.

 

Noire et Bleue No 22 (2012) (right) is the image used in publicity for the exhibition.  It is in fact a self portrait, a blue painting in which the artist sits, wearing dark glasses and a fedora hat.  His gaze is directed at something invisible to the viewer to which the artist points with the forefinger of his right hand.  For Monory, as for Joseph Beuys, the hat is a sign of personal and artistic identity and is indissolubly linked to characters on both sides of the law in film Noire.

 

Noire et Bleue No 23 (2012) (top right), the next in the series is also in the exhibition.  A naked woman, her face obscured by her hair is depicted on the right of an interior space in which a bare light bulb hangs over a large pistol.  The bulb and the pistol are painted.  Other works in the exhibition include real pistols and a real light bulb.  How are the two paintings linked?  Are they linked?  Is No 23 a scene directed by the artist in No 22?  Is the gesture of the artist one of reaction or direction?  Is he detached or involved, a bystander or a controller?

 

Upstairs are very different paintings, a series collectively called Ciel, in which Monory  leaves earth for the stars, freeing him from banal ‘mythologies quotidiennes’ and putting the human condition into a universal perspective.

 

Monory is often described by his critics as a ‘dandy’, from the French word ‘flaneur’, adopted by Baudelaire to define nineteenth century urban man as an observer of life, usually seen as

detached, disengaged, uninvolved.  For Monory, ‘dandyism’ fails in the face of inhumanity.  For Monory, ‘dandyism’ means ‘composure’ as a strategy for survival as an artist and a man.