Jean-Louis Kolb

Jean-Louis Kolb was born in Niort, France, in 1956.

"There is a common thing that is still considered as being a part of the contemporary artistic research, even if it was at the heart of a practice that is of ancient origins already. It's this perimeter that is being built inside the limits of a frame and a chassis, in this window/mirror that we call a painting and that becomes alive with the help of pigments and paint binders that are mixed and applied to the canvas. The painted surface is vertiginous indeed, as its limits are impossible to determine; and this statement is the basis of theartistic practice of Jean-Louis Kolb.

In this adventure that started in the mid-80s, there is this union of two opposite forces put into action simultaneously by the artist, that of spontaneity and that of control, the collaboration between improvisation and the step backwards that the artist makes thanks to his experience, his savoir-faire, his mastering of the artistic technique.

Kolb has always lived the adventure of painting as an apprehension of a field of experimentation and discovery of an artistic latency that lay exactly where the pigments and the binders meet the texture of the canvas, the support. His format is a square of 1m/1m where Kolb gives life to a material expression in which the pigments make signs and shapes appear and disappear at once, in the emulsion on the canvas, in the heart of the window/mirror of the painting."