Jean-Daniel Rousseau

Jean-Daniel Rousseau does not make a profession of painting. However, he has been painting for many, many years. It is an old passion, perennial, sometimes quite invasive ... On his website there are more than a thousand paintings on twenty themes. He thus “stored” a very large number of canvases which “sleep”, in silence and invisible. Today he would like to bring this work out of the shadows.

For him, painting is neither a hobby nor a therapy but a mode of expression, a form of exploration of an interior territory long fallow, another facet of oneself, which allows to find oneself, to dispose of a clean time, most often in the search for the purity of the form ...

It is said that in Sanskrit, words do not designate things, as with us in the West. The words are used to say the relation which one has with the thing. As a result, there are more than a thousand words to name water, depending on the moment, depending on the state of mind, depending on the emotion in which we find ourselves. So it is with painting for Jean-Daniel Rousseau. Even if most often the result is figurative, it is less the thing that is painted than the relation to that thing.

With hindsight, after thousands of completed canvases and research work on paper, a "style" shines through: priority to linear over pictorial / multiplication of solids / cohabitation of sometimes contradictory themes / logic of repetition, sometimes to the limit neurotic / monochrome / assemblages of canvases on the same object or on the same theme / obsession with series, as long as we have not exhausted their potentialities / meeting ad libitum of possible crossings of themes / abuse and sometimes ease of symbolism so elementary that they border on caricature ...

However, he thinks he can say that it is not the style that determines what is painted. It is the manner, the specificity, the writing and the language which are peculiar to it and in which it achieves its most appropriate expression.

A language that has been built over time. It is made of simplicity, not to say frugality. All other things being equal, he applies a simple principle: “Ockam's razor”, transposed to painting. In ordinary language, this is to say that what is sought is the economy of means in relation to the results produced. In even more ordinary language: "Why make it complicated when you can make it simple?" ".

Many themes are developed, have taken shape and mature over the years. Some are now mature, others still on the way. However, he does not always know what drives him to do what he is doing. The sense of project and adventure sometimes only appears during the action. Advancing. Afterwards, he can only see that it was the right thing to do.