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It was high time for a retrospective of the works of Jean Lecoultre, one of the most important Swiss painters of the 20th Century. Breaking away from traditional subjects, methods of representation and techniques, Lecoultre sees the reality of our times with a new eye. He certainly owes a lot to surrealism and Pop Art, but he has taken a new route, by looking through to the fantastic world behind media images - more than ever a case of "disquieting strangeness".
His work itself is marked by a break which took place in the '60's. His discontinuity has an original, inventive nature, provoking and constructive at the same time. It works spectacularly, recurrently, like a great gulf in each of the compositions, and, on a larger scale, like a theme linking each series to the next.
Lecoultre had started as a self-taught painter, mainly inspired by Paul Klee. He went to live in Madrid from 1951 to 1957, and his time there had a profound effect on him. The arid landscapes, the fascination with death, the discovery of the Prado Museum, and reading Malraux's "L'Espoir" liberated him from his early influences. His palette moved into an earthy register of yellows, ochres, siennas, greys and blacks. Back in Switzerland, he still makes frequent trips to Spain, which is still his formal source of inspiration, in particular in matters of colours, if not iconography.
Around 1962, Lecoultre did an about-turn and confronted the most aggressive aspects of modernity: urban life, mass-produces objects and industrial machinery. This artificial universe is haunted by flickering, faceless silhouettes, identified only by their social attributes - soft hats, cravats and dinner jackets; evasive, intermittent characters, seeming to struggle compulsively against a loss of self, as though they owed their existence to a flash bulb or the light of a neon sign. This is no heroic representation of modern life, and the effect is a panicky feeling that nothing is objectified but what is seen.
At the end of the '70's, Lecoultre seemed to want to ask the new media images how they worked. In his hands, the airbrush, which he used extensively, became a dream-like instrument which, with a puff could produce a figure and make it disappear. The predilection for synthetic enamel, the incorporation in the picture of tangible materials like aluminium, plexiglass, synthetic fur and cellophane, draw attention to the actual medium of the image.
Paintings on metal grids, made of regularly spaced superimposed plates and painted with the same motif, look different depending on where you stand, and throw doubt on the very reality they are meant to represent.
From 1975, in the series entitled "Territoires Greffés", "Etats de Sièges" and "Les Corps Constitués", the painter shows objects from the domestic world, contemporary furniture, metal rods, bathroom tiles, fabric and furs, but interpenetrating, grafted, becoming hybrids, transgressing the natural order and producing alarming connections in the subconscious. The human being reappears, but prostrate, deprived of any will, incapable of pulling away from a terribly possessive objectiveness, threatened with absorption by the objects, and even loss of being.
From 1986 to 1989, in the series "Domaines Rapportés", the painter intensified his personal involvement and moved into the field of painting. He gave up the airbrush for the paintbrush, as though here, too, he could strengthen his material and bodily contact with the skin of the canvas. With greater virtuosity than ever, he played with the illusionist aspects of painting, producing imperious realities and then suddenly making them disappear or mutate, as though to catch us unawares as we form our own mental projections. Since 1993, he has produced series after series, more then ever marked by suspicion, as can be seen from their titles; "Les Interviews", "Ombres Emportées", "Pièces à Conviction", and "Témoins retrouvés".
The painter becomes a detective, opening an investigation into a series of disappearances, which evidently relate to the new forms of violence we now know on all levels, domestic, urban, national and world-wide. He collects the crumbs of evidence and records all the statements. The spectator, in turn, examines the canvas like a worrying case, coming up with the wildest solutions. In fact what has really disappeared is reality, the victim of a near-perfect crime.
The retrospective exhibition will bring together the most significant works from each period, in particular large format paintings that have never been shown in public, as well as a selection of works on paper and engravings. Michel Thévoz, formerly Director of the Musée de la Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, is the organiser and the author of the exhibition catalogue.
Since June 1998, the Salle du Bellevédère, a new display area in the Fondation Pierre Gianadda, has been home to 10 masterpieces from the collection of Louis and Evelyn Franck. In order to preserve the cohesion of this artistic heritage, these major works, including canvases by Cézanne, Van Gogh, James Ensor, Toulouse-Lautrec, Kees van Dongen and Picasso, have been lent to Martigny by the Fondation Socindec for a period of 15 years. This foundation was set up by Louis Franck in 1962 to hold most of the works of art he and his wife Evelyn had acquired.
Exhibition catalogue
The catalogue is generously documented, with the biography and
bibliography, as well as colour reproductions
of all the works on display:
Exhibition Organiser : Michel Thévoz, assisted by Julien Goumaz
Author : Michel Thévoz, Christophe Gallaz, Freddy Buache, Jacques Chessex, Julien Goumaz, Florian Rodari Michel Butor
Pages: 175 pages, français,
Prix: Softcover SFr.45.-, euro 31.50-
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