NEWS & EVENTS

Exhibition: Don Jacques Ciccolini

Don Jacques Ciccolini was born in Paris in 1952. Since the late 60s, his studio has been in Pertuis, in the Vaucluse, France. He presently teaches painting at the Art School of Aix-en-Provence where he follows the non-directive, yet rigorous style he learnt from the artist, Vincent Bioulès. When he was sixteen, his school was temporarily housed in Rue Roux-Alphéran just behind the Granet Museum in Aix, where one summer he spent as a night-watchman. Vincent Bioulès wrote a short preface about his graduate work, for a Paris exhibition entitled 36/72 which rewarded the ‘Prix’ (best students) of each painting school in France. Bioulès identified in Don Jacques Ciccolini’s work that "specific color range, particular to each individual, is (in his work) understated and restrained" which has become synonymous with Don Jacques’style.

One day in April 1971, Don Jacques Ciccolini discovered the first major French exhibition of Giorgio Morandi at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The totally unexpected emotion coincided wonderfully with his own personal research. ‘A single beam of light penetrating’ through the bottles on the shelves of the attic- his first studio- became the motif of his paintings, long before he saw Morandi‘s work.

As often as possible Don Jacques Ciccolini has followed in the footsteps of de Chirico and Morandi, travelling to Ferrara and Bologna in Italy. In his youth, he painted still-lives and minimalist canvases. Nowadays, he paints large open spaces, creating paradoxical atmospheres; urban architecture with high terraces, blind -windows, chimeras and a mysterious emptiness. He has a fascination for the Orient, like the romantic travellers of yore. His subject matter can vary from charred mountains, ruined arches and those outskirts of cities excluded from great historical changes, a ride on Lake Constance or even a deserted wharf along a stretch of alpine water, can fire his imagination.

He paints sparsely-populated Provencal hills, blue horizons which encourage you to go back on the road, specifically the banks and mountains near the Durance river or the fringes of the arid part of Estaque, near Marseille. These are the subject matter he returns to time and again. His palette is of browns, blacks, greens, walnut -stained, the land of Siena and ochres, inspired by Gustave Courbet or Paul Guigou or other small masters who were working before Cézanne such as Emile Loubon, Marius Engalière and Prosper Grézy. Walter Benjamin wrote, thinking of Proust or Penelope, "it is the day which undoes what was done at night." There is the present, the shadows that follow us, anger and anxiety, fossils and pebbles we take to understand the distant past, the harshness of the sun, joy, fear or oblivion, all this firmly and gently bound together to feel and see in his paintings,.
DJC - as his friends call him - makes his own canvases and frames. 158 cm in length or 20 x 13 cm like a handkerchief. The sizes are specifically adapted for his work. He passes from large to small formats with ease, capably passing from large breathtaking canvases to miniature landscape paintings.

Painting and observing are profound actions, where learning never ceases. His work seems to be out-of-time- seeing factory smoke on a starry night looking or at an old country house and trees will make you shiver. In his canvas deliberately placed on the cliff of St.Eucher upstream from Saint-Paul-les-Durance overlooking the highway,lights swirl and decline, there are flights of birds, jackdaws or tiny swifts, crevices, shrubs, rocks, and then the storms and eddies of a river that could be the Styx.

On another of his paintings, a bluff of rock rises: the side of the mountain that can be seen everywhere around Aix is shown emerging from the Bimont dam. The painter is a relay, an actor in a larger story. On the back of the wood panel of this painting, Don Jacques Ciccoloni wrote: "Paul Guigou died in 1870, the year before, Cezanne had painted his very first Sainte-Victoire".
Alain Paire