Looking at Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel’s work, one feels between the worlds of painting and sculpture, or sculpture and architecture. “You never are in the landscape that you are looking at”; her sculptures are a rendition of the illusion of painting. They are drawings coming out of the wall, a horizon towards imaginary landscapes that bring us to a systematic realization of body and space while disturbing our perception of the place we are in. A landscape aims for the eyes; it is a mental image, a place where one can measure a space which is otherwise immeasurable.
Since 1998, she had been using flexible plywood but in 2002 she gave it up for materials like cast aluminum for her exhibit at the Fernand Léger gallery and the Biennial of Enghien-les-Bains and more recently she has been using particle board and paint. Pieces of particle board look torn up and are then covered with car paint, creating a contrast with the sides of the broken pieces, which are left unpainted. She then sprinkles “puddles” of paint on the lacquered surface.
Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel was born in France in 1965. She lives and works in Paris. A solo exhibit of her work is scheduled at the Maréchalerie of Versailles for the spring of 2008. She also had solo exhibits at the contemporary art center of Jau in the spring of 2007 as well as at the Chaufferie in Strasbourg in 2004 (a catalog of the exhibit was published with the partnership of Xippas Gallery). The “Balcon (pour longtemps regarder)”, her monumental work of cast aluminum that she made for the Bourse d’Art Monumental (Grant for Monumental Art) of the city of Ivry-sur-Seine was inaugurated in 2006 at the harbor of Ivry-sur-Seine.
