Imlil - série Paysage marocain coloré, 2023

Jean-Marc Lemasson  

Born in Morocco in 1957 in a family where the pictorial tradition is very strong, I am an artist-painter, traveler. Self-taught, I have been painting since I was a child and I approach art as an amateur, in the first sense of the term.

For more than 40 years, I have particularly travelled through the Middle East, Asia, Oceania and Latin America. These discoveries have led me to take an interest in traditional arts, architecture, myths and religions. This journey also led me to the practice of classical Indian music, the sitar.

On the roads, artists accompanied me: Stevenson, London, Melville, Hesse, Rimbaud, Montaigne, Spinoza, Nougaro, Bach... And the drawings and paintings of Hugo Pratt, Delacroix, Gauguin, Matisse, Giotto, Caravaggio, Kandinsky, Macke. All of them are explorers of the soul.

Since 2010 I practice Chinese ink painting, Shan Shui, a spiritual way where meditation meets spontaneous gesture, between empty and full.

I have exhibited in Paris (galerie Hérouet-le Marais, galerie St Paul), participated in several collective exhibitions (Indépendants, salon d'Automne, peintres du spectacle).

Equipped with these famous notebooks with black covers, I sketch on the spot, the fleeting moment, the one that fixes a note of colored music on the white page of memories. I use these notebooks to capture landscapes, emotions suspended in time. I treat them with watercolor but also with ink, felt pen, pencil, pastel, gouache. Some of these drawings and sketches are then rendered in larger formats. These dreamlike moments are then transfigured thanks to the voluptuousness of oil on canvas.

My works are as many windows open on the rustle of life and the impulse of the light. As a lover of color, I like to follow a pictorial path that celebrates emotion, the expression of feelings, the abundance of nature and its mysteries.