Joël Besse

Born in Brive in 1951, Joël Besse is a French plastic artist living and working in the Paris area. 

Now frequently found in galleries and art fairs, Besse's graphic canvases and reliefs were first exhibited in 1998 at the Art Centre in Fortaleza, Brazil. 

His pictorial technique is as complex as it is unique; his compositions are aerial, made up of collages of scraps of paper carefully folded and refolded in geometric forms before being rigorously assembled, often set against a white background of either canvas or wood. 

Besse paints each piece of paper by hand with vivid reds and electric blues. The final results are always spectacular, with even the reverse sides contributes to the poetry of the work. They seem to resemble hundreds of butterflies flying away from the frame which welcomed them, or perhaps futuristic architectural installations. 

His modern, piercing creations resemble miniature original sculptures, Beese doesn't afford the inidivdual pieces any importance; to him each model produced is just that, a model - a means and not an end. The piece has to be considered in its entirety in order to appreciate its true value as an artwork. 

The infinite identical folds in Besse's works portray the sense and the vision of the artist to the world; far from being a simply aesthetic addition, they are a necessity, comparable to what Vassily Kadinsky referred to as 'the interior necessity'. 

Besse seeks to achieve utmost simplicity and purity in his works, looking to strip away anything superfluous in order to concentrate on only the essential. The repetition of minimal forms therefore becomes a commitment to finding a living space. 

You can find an range of Besse's artworks on Artsper.