Jean-Marie Cartereau

Jean-Marie Cartereau is an in-between artist.

He plays, in drawing or painting, with the ambiguities of representation, creating a fantasy universe in which animal and plant merge, a mystery where the image emerging from the blur of the pigments imposes itself on the artist. . Jean-Marie Cartereau explores the frontiers of the not yet here and the more completely there and invites us to discover the thin limit of opposites, stability, instability, the link with the land which he transforms into a mangrove in his series Transitory Landscapes , or on the contrary the call to ascension, to the celestial and sometimes to the disturbing with the series Wings ether and limbo…

Creation is for him the equivalent of a language which imposes its strength in connection with its way of life. His relationship with nature is transcended by his imagination, as traced in 2013 his second retrospective at Villa Tamaris under the title My natural history. The Les faux semblants series bears witness to this, with its intriguing but playful creatures, a synthesis of foliage and roots that we would have discovered and onto which we would project, like a child, a fantastic world.

Jean-Marie Cartereau is also an artist of silence.

He works in his studio before the start of any activity, in this period, after the night before the day, between dog and wolf, where real and intangible mix. The Smokes, Mists and Fog series evokes this idea, the notion of a necessary link, the artist representing the activity of a factory, a steam train, all lost in a landscape whose contours fade, confusing the ordinary of activity with the world of dreams. The other question to explore concerns the understanding of the path to follow to know what is reached in us when our gaze lingers to understand the work with which we are confronted.

Obviously, this universe covers the path traveled from the origins to the present day. Long path for an evolution which concerns him in the first place.

Here we find an "expressionist" need which concerns both matter on the physical level and the space in which nature is situated. There is a transfiguration of the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human through the prism of color which plays with the magnificence of the rainbow.

We must not forget that the attention paid to nature is not a representation of photographic reality but an imperious need for spirituality which guides the first steps towards a need for the beyond.

"To create chaos to better order it", such could be the desire of Jean-Marie Cartereau.