Jean-Marie Torque

Impregnated by the culture of weaving, by its ancestral technique and its universally diffused applications with which we are in direct contact from our childhood, in the form of the fabrics of our clothes, the artist Jean Marie Torque is surprised to draw as one weaves.

He is at his drawing board like a weaver at his loom where he has replaced the thread with the line. The artist works with the same meticulousness, the same time-consuming perseverance. Warp thread and weft thread find their equivalence in horizontal and vertical lines to which oblique lines are added, authorized by the design.

We know that the quality of a textile is essentially due to the quality of the thread used and the number of threads used. If the beauty of a work drawn by Torque obviously cannot be reduced to the number of lines drawn, it is certain, on the other hand, that the quality of the line used, its density, the regularity of its thickness or its modulation, the controlled or sometimes relaxed gesture, the regular or very slightly staggered intervals, all this set of know-how - what was once precisely called the profession - contributes to this vibration which gives the whole drawing such disturbing life. Sometimes the lines regain their freedom, evoking skeins or frayed fabrics like the wear and tear of time.

If Maurice Denis reminded us that a painting - before being a battle horse, a naked woman, or any anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order assembled... Jean-Marie Torque, as for him, convinces us that a drawing before being a story is before

a whole white surface covered with lines that are in a certain sense compound. But the visual artist's power of evocation is powerful and this principle, so elementary, so simple a priori and so modest in its foundations, from the pen of this sensitive artist, manages to move us, upset us, hypnotize us, seduce us, transform.