Après avoir marché tout est beau, 2017

Juliette June   New & remarkable Artists

Juliette June's work is deployed in three areas: oil painting, drawing and collage, and performance. Multicolored reflections in the water, bodies on a stone, light through foliage, shovels and buckets scattered on a beach are all subjects tackled in the artist's brightly colored paintings. However, the motive is not always obvious at first glance. The figurative sometimes gives way to a poetic imagination, opening up several narrative spaces. The formats vary from very small for some studies to more major works. The colorful drawings are quickly executed in felt, some include collages. If they are sometimes the result of observations (an autumn afternoon in the port of a village, a tree, a face), it is most often a question of externalizing a bodily sensation: a flexion of the thorax, the porosity of the hands, or to let abstract shapes emerge. The performance, meanwhile, takes shamanic turns or is funny: a few words, a direct relationship with the audience, a dance, a drawing created on site. Fascinated by the body and its sensory capacities, the artist is often inspired by moments of intense reality: the sun rising on a path, the red of its rules in the shower, the silvery light on the smooth sea. Sometimes deliberately depriving herself of the photographic tool, she exercises her memory or works directly on the motif to translate this energetic fabric which makes us feel the real and tries to give it shape. “This desire to create forms, which implicitly tell that I am the sea I look at, the person I paint, the stone on which I rest or in any case that I am part of the same matrix as her. , is insatiable. For Juliette June the role of the artist comes down to this: to feel, to create, to preserve. Feel the cold, the heat, the clear, the dark, receive these sensations, absorb them, then develop a pictorial language: create a form that translates them and then transmit it to the viewer. It is a way for her to activate our consciousness, to nourish our soul with poetic material and thus stimulate bodily sensation. The circle is complete. Juliette June's approach is akin to artistic research in the spiritual sense (from the inside to the inside, the body as a gateway to another dimension) where “the artist is the hand which, through proper use of form, puts the human soul in vibration ”as Kandinsky writes, and in this sense moves away from the purely plastic research specific to certain areas of contemporary painting. Whether in the materiality of painting, drawing or in the instantaneity of a performance, Juliette June's works attempt to give shape to bodily sensations by thus restoring reality to its poetic nature.