Jean-Pierre Stora (1933-1996)
For her very first solo exhibition that Lise Cormery will organize for Jean-Pierre Stora in her gallery located at 6, rue de Lanneau, in the Latin Quarter of Paris, Geneviève Jamet-Cortat, Curator of the National Museums will write for her friend Lise Cormery. A catalog will be published on this occasion.
Jean-Pierre Stora "a dynamic of sincerity of the soul".
It is a very particular art which offers to our meditations this painter born in Algiers on November 11, 1933. Student at the Beaux-Arts of Paris twenty years later, Jean-Pierre Stora pursues with a tenacious discretion pictorial research oriented towards what I will name a dynamic of sincerity of the soul. A sincerity of a painful stripping. Hence the very lively interest of a work in which the originality of the geometric compositions evolving in the manner of certain insect migrations, and the undulating movements of crowds as if observed from an airplane. I will add a warplane, invisible and threatening. For Stora's painting resounds from the death knell of the funeral hours, when what was to be called "decolonization" began in blood, noise and fury. J.P. Stora's work carries within it the wound of a past that is emerging at every moment. Beneath the solidity of the composition, one appreciates the sobriety of the drawing, very interesting to study when the technique is both moving and firmly precise.
Let us now observe his "Public Places", his "Sunken Ports", his "Parades of the French Navy": the deep message of the painter goes beyond the simple scope of the image. In the frightened crowds that unknowingly walk towards death - that of bodies and souls - in the steel-colored uniforms with bright red and blue strokes of the sailors who are leaving forever (we can guess, we know), in the inexorable sinking of the magnificent ports, we feel something fatal like tragedy and sinister like the coup d'état. But what saves the men seen by Stora from despair is their determination to want to breathe, to want to exorcise, to want to live. This uncommon work, woven of virile strength and suffering intuition in the delicacy of a meticulous and subtle stroke, stands before us as a witness to a time when everything was lost - including honor. Let us not miss the appointment offered to us by Jean-Pierre Stora.
- Geneviève Jamet-Cortat
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