Jacques Roch

Jacques Roch (1934-2015) was a Franco-American painter born in Lyon. He studied at the Lyon and Paris Beaux-Art Schools and, after numerous travels, the Algerian War and some years spent in Paris, Jacques Roch moved to New York in 1979.

May 1968 in Paris caught him within the Situationist movement. Jacques Roch was given the opportunity to produce a book of drawings called “Paris Ville Piège”, published in 1970 by André Baland, in which the monuments of Paris are transformed into a new reality. He also produced a series of surrealist humorous comic strips published in underground magazines at the time.

Unique characters are, in part, how Jacques Roch first made a name for himself. Today, they pop up on color-saturated canvases to reveal a surreal world that echoes Roch's own dark humor. "Color is really the door to a kind of joy. In the last 10 years, I've been dealing with the light because there is enough darkness around," says Roch.