Bernard Jannemin

Born in Lorraine in 1955, Bernard Jannemin has lived and worked in Brittany since 1979. At the Beaux-Arts, a passenger, he prefers meetings with artists: Moarch Eveno, Sayed Darwich, Jacques Maréchal... He exhibits with the group 96 in Paris in 1982. He was selected twice for the Mostra Illustratori in Bologna in 1991 and 1998; exhibited at the Itabashi Art Museum in Tokyo. Illustration prize in 1992 in Hamburg. Illustrates books (Messidor-La-Farandole editions, Paris; Harmonia Mundi le chant du monde).
He has exhibited in France and abroad since 1980.

“Invitation to listen to a living, vibrant land, a land that is both hospitable and harsh, populated by a world in full birth, this is what Bernard Jannemin's recent paintings offer us. Bodies rise from these incandescent red earths, well embodied, well rooted and yet stretched towards the sky to open onto an aerial dimension like trees clinging to the earth and the cosmos.

These concrete representations specific to the artist's abstract realities take their identity from the movement caused by ample bodies and the expression of their mask. We glimpse in his paintings, a staging, a staging specific to dramaturgy. It sets the scene for a rough, sharp world, where beings seek each other out, wonder about their role Drapes to accentuate the movement, and masks for the magic of sacred rites that take the paths of the primitive, tribal state of what being is in reality.

These expressive masks seem to cast a gaze on who observes them. Yet they essentially focus their eyes and their emotions, that is to say those of the artist, on a world deeply disturbed in its values. In our time, where beliefs and spiritual ideals are undermined, it is good to be invited to meditation, listening to the world, to the one we carry in each of us.

Bernard Jannemin explores it in the materials, the transparencies, the opacities of the pigments: burnt sienna, ochres, red oxides, revealing more clarity, luminosity, and if sometimes imperceptible gilding appears, these are only traces of a derisory world subject to material wealth.

He sticks, sands, scrapes wood, canvas, sand, paper, fabrics with rough or fine wefts, and it is these reliefs that call for the form; the characters marry the reliefs, harmonize, blend with the created environment. From these materials appears a new creature, an unknown, but its presence reassures us, it proves to us that we are perhaps not so far from the representations of the painter.

The imprint also takes on an important, primordial role in the composition, that of remembrance, of memory. The earth always bears traces of something that happened, like signs, uncertain writing leaving a message for future beings that fundamentally unites them in space-time. Bernard Jannemin inscribes them on a wide variety of supports: floating canvases without stretchers, all-length or, on the contrary, all-width formats, which give the painting an extension, an extension beyond the frame without the embarrassment of rules.

Another period is therefore beginning with Bernard Jannemin. Until then we were used to seeing a painting that was both more ethereal and more mineral, inspired by the skies, seas and rocky shores of Brittany where he has lived and worked for over twenty years. Masks, a recurring theme with him, already had a strong presence, but there, in his latest works, this pivotal theme fully blossoms in the midst of red, burnt, theatrical earth; ecological and profoundly human concerns are sensed. »Dimitri Muller