Jean-Luc Parant
Artist born in 1944, lives and works in Normandy.
On the occasion of the first exhibition of the NATIVE cycle, the work of an eminent artist, that of Jean-Luc Parant (born in Tunis in 1944), is exceptionally compared with the various works presented in this exhibition. An imposing figure in contemporary art, Jean-Luc Parant does not however belong to any well-defined disciplinary field, practicing both writing and sculpture. Visual artist, writer and poet all at the same time, he defines himself as a manufacturer of “balls and texts on the eyes1”.
His work has been exhibited in renowned institutions, such as the Center Pompidou, on the notable occasion of an "uninterrupted reading" organized by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1977, at the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2009, or at the Paul Valéry Museum in Sète in 2016.
The installation Éboulements (sd) presented in the exhibition retraces the plural questions that have crossed his work since his beginnings. It presents a set of terracotta balls placed on the ground and stacked on top of each other. “I look at my balls further and further in space and they are getting smaller and smaller before my eyes. So small that they become untouchable 2”. The balls are however there before our eyes, deformed, flattened or precariously arranged in space. The work is an opportunity to recall the multiple questions that have nourished the artist's thought, that of the tactile dimension
of sculpture, that of the persistent correspondences between the spherical form and the origins of the world, or that of the precarious balance existing between the flat tint and the volume.