Ingert - Jean-Luc Jehan, Du spirituel dans l'arbre

There is something in the work of Jean-Luc Jehan (born in 1956) that attracts and intrigues. Like a gesture arising from a larger and more invisible movement, which could be the formation of a cloud or a galaxy, an element that expands, swirls and fogs each piece of art in the thickness of mystery. We can feel that questions are still being asked, patiently and unpretentiously about the world, about time, about history. During an initial period, Jean-Luc Jehan built and represented prototypes of flying machines, “satellite objects” (as he calls them) inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s projects and the aeronautics of the 19th century. Flying machines, or rather winged machines, because the artist is very careful, each time, to ensure that they can’t fly, that something always malfunctions. The point, one might say, is to make sure that even with the greatest wings, with the greatest zeal, they can’t travel through skies other than those of the imagination or of thought. If the machines eventually disappear, the skies remain, a fluid, ethereal space that forms the common ground for all his works, the place where they unfold and appear. 

Then comes the adoption of a new decisive technique, derived from the effect of the pigment punctuating the paper : to create an echo with the tiny spots, which introduce the microscopic in the representations of infinity, Jean-Luc Jehan comes to drawing only with dots, applied with a tubular ink pen with tips of 0.10 to 0.25 millimetres. From now on, everything starts with the dot, sometimes stretched into the beginning of a line ; everything is formed point by point, by the thousands of dots placed one after the other on the surface of the paper, repeated, multiplied, concentrated and dispersed. An endless aggregation of minimal operations. Between the dots, the white paper left in reserve, and, at times, the barely perceptible and almost unseen sparkle of a gold leaf’s flake. Angels, trees, mountains, horsemen : most of these figures are borrowed from the Italian Renaissance, which, as the artist says, “grounds” all his works and lives in him constantly. They evoke and invoke another epoch, another time.