Jean-Luc Blanc’s drawings compile what’s already there: images he
extracts from films, from postcards, from press photographs, from magazines,
from leaflets. They form a lame inventory, which he says measures up to a common scandal, completely garish, and
which he thinks belongs to an indeterminate
and yet definitive space, somewhere in between an illumination and a pig sly.
Before roaching the state which enables him to point out this common scandal – or, always in his own
terms, to measure the roots of the
uneasiness images always breed – JL Blanc begins by making a multitude of
sketches which he then sets aside. It is in this phase that the already
constituted images he selects are deconstructed and that the motif is isolated.
Resonating in a void, detached from the signifying system which habitually
directs its perception, the figure acquires a generally incomprehensible
character.
Like a floating sign, it is projected in a space where it only seems to
function in the register of the spectacular – that is, as a form to identify
with, against which the spectator must conjure his own ressources to recompose
its signifying process. In this process, each viewer finds the occasion to
examine the ways in which the most naked and brutal strings of his relationship
to images are constituted through the pathetic and the sublime. The pathetic,
in the way the flame from a candle, an upside-down chair, a broken skull, a
woman kneeling from the back or a man in ecstasy in front of a banner which
says Jesus loves us can raise
feelings which can saturate the field of representation. And the sublime, in
the way the same images reflect almost inconditionally the collapse of language
– the very language which should enable us to deal with the singularity of
these images according to rational categories.
JL Blanc doesn’t hesitate to play with narrative sequences. For about
ten years, he ceaselessly has refined his technique to produce this effect,
notably by shifting from line drawing to color, by reinforcing the feeling of
fragmentation through close-ups, or by paying special attention to the
backgrounds behind his figures. This narrative effect is also reinforced by the
short statements he reproduces on black background, reminiscent of the textual
interludes in silent movies. But what a disjunction or the sign of a
dysfunction underlining the discontinuity of our imaginary? Under this angle,
the Imaginary therefore does not look so much as a field of ruins, but rather
like a space whose identity stays precarious and fluid, subject to multiple
impregnations, influences, and alienations.
Text of the exhibition Sing- Sing,