Jean Claracq

Painter of miniatures and icons, Jean Claracq creates a dialogue between painting and digital art. His models, drawn from social networks such as Instagram and Grindr, are part of the gay community. They interact in his paintings with numerous references to art history, particularly the schools of Northern Europe. Attached to traditional techniques – through his use of oil painting on wood and his attention to details – the artist plays with different possible levels of reading and accurately depicts our relationship with screens and solitude in an urban environment.

Jean Claracq brings the past forward via savvy remarks on the culture industry of the 21st century. Claracq’s paintings exploit, in the most delicate and refined form, the language of advertisement and social media to construct desire, fascination, and lust. With eclectic references that range from medieval paintings to elements of contemporary pop culture, a dystopian view of la joie de vivre unveils a new alternative to the divine perception of the world. In his work, Jean evokes the ambivalence within joy and pleasure when mixed with the anguish of an unstructured world on the verge of collapse. He summons the architecture of suburban areas, in particular car parks, the symbol of a world alienated by consumerism to the point of sacrificing its own existence.