Sans titre, Circa 1995

Jacques Rouby  

Oil painting on sculpted cardboard.

Unique Artwork

Jacques ROUBY, the aesthetics of mystery

"An experimental dreamer, passionate about graphic adventures, voluntarily marginal, Jacques Rouby engages in a dive into the abysses of floating inspiration and uncontrolled intuition. Randomness speaks and the accident is welcome. During an interview, Jacques Rouby speaks of [sic]. Elsewhere he says: [sic]. Finely colored, his sculpted cardboards are scarred, pitted with abrasions, scratched, scraped, scarified, riddled with bursts of staples... Craters, lava, erosion, sedimentation in patches, the gaze is projected onto unusual topographies, suggesting aerial views of unknown planets, extraterrestrial swerves, or virgin lands resulting from underwater explorations. The imagination is invited to a total change of scenery...

One thinks of Dubuffet's [sic], his inventories of [sic], uninventoried spaces, ignored by maps, close neighbors of Henri Michaux's [sic] or his [sic]. Rouby lives in the manner of Michaux, in an imaginary country that he moreover has the pleasure of creating almost without his knowledge. 'I live my art as a journey,' he declares in an interview.

'To do and undo' teaches Zen philosophy. Jacques Rouby has produced thousands of drawings, piled up in his studio and victims twice of a sudden flood. A catastrophe taken with astonishing philosophy by the artist, who considers that the second phase of his work is the [sic]. This notion should be taken in the sense that Leonardo da Vinci encouraged drawing inspiration from the stains on an old wall damaged by time. 'A passionately enamored character of incognito, art is always where you least expect it,' wrote Jean Dubuffet. Rouby is an artist of the infinitesimal, an infinitesimal rich with teeming life. An approach that participates in an aesthetics of mystery and this concept invented by Jankélévitch of [sic]. Hence Jacques Rouby's declared fascination for the ghostly character of Ophelia or the figure of Verlaine, a flamboyant poet, in his crepuscular final years."

Xavier Bureau, 2025