Jean-Paul Muslin

Jean-Paul Muslin or the profane use of the sacred

Jean-Paul Muslin was born in Paris in 1948. After studying at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Paris (1965-1971) and at the UER of scenography of the Faculty of Censier (1968-1971 with Arthur Adamov), his professional career embraced for a long time the plastic arts and the performing arts. .

Beyond the possible classification of “singular art”, his work as a plastic artist, at all times, revolves around the same “subject”: the body in torment, suffering, eroticism and death. His friend Guy Denis, gallery owner and writer, defines him as an “artist of agony”. .

For a long time, inhabited by a memory of total horror, he never ceases to question the mechanisms hidden from man himself which lead to this sort of mental evisceration and leaves the human in tatters.

In his work as a visual artist, as well as in certain theatrical researches ("Trial of Gilles de Rais"), he will draw from Georges Bataille in particular, the possible keys to understanding this "gray area" evoked by Primo Lévi in his major work " If he's a man ”and that haunted him.

His dolls, his suspensions, his falls and his waterfalls, his tortured bodies, his bronzes, all represent the interrogative form closest to memory and memory, it is for Jean-Paul Muslin, since his visual impairment, the unique means to transmit, to capture something from this library, an image bank accumulated over the years which draws neither on the beautiful nor the ugly, but on the enigma of the absolute death zone (see Primo Levi). It is the memory of the memory which will constitute the motor without which nothing is possible of this exploration of the “gray areas” of the world.