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(article extracted from the “Petit Journal” of the National Museum of Modern Art n ° 31

(…) In 1972, Jacquet returned to oil painting and began the “Land” period. This second period is introduced by a serigraphic report on canvas, repainted in oil, The First Breakfast, which shows an image of the earth taken by one of the astronauts of the Apollo space mission of 1969. (…) Alain Jacquet develops, from this satellite image and through the analysis of the constituent elements of the pivot image of this point-earth, a parasitic narration which feeds on the distortions that the interpretation makes the image undergo. By more or less underlined indications, the artist will reveal, according to the old precept described by Leonardo da Vinci, the drawing virtually inscribed in the spot, the face or the animal inscribed in the blurred outline of an ocean, and intersect surreptitiously, in the frame of the image, his personal experiences and fantasies. It is the sidereal distance, now made between the eye and the image, which allows the artist to reconstruct the vision by introducing the image in a “visionary” dimension. The image is formed by contamination, confusion of the visible and the vision. Jacquet superimposes the morbid precision of the fantasy image on the mechanical imprecision of the scientific image.

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The exhibition confronts the hand-painted and machine-painted works that Jacquet has produced at the same time since 1981. After the serigraphic transfers of the works of the 1960s, he returned to the traditional oil technique by setting the equivalence of the painting by hand and painting with the computer, and exploits at ease the tricks that are nowadays authorized by high-tech processes. The works he then produced, such as Hot Dog, Le Bousier, La Vérité leaving the Well, are directly derived from The First Breakfast. In The Truth emerging from the Well, this earth rotated 180 ° is dilated, annihilated by a gigantic coital vision, the continents of Asia and Africa delimiting the contours of male and female figures.

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In the following works, such as Egg, Donut, Factory or Horsehead, the image takes all forms of anamorphosis, and the lands that have become flat, ovoid or annular, are going to be called Flying Carpets, Eggs or Donuts, thus ironically renewing with an iconology of Pop Art. These distortions, like the pictorial material itself, are obtained by a generic process (work on a graphic palette and 3M computer), the computer alone carrying out the various operations from the laser reading of a document to its reproduction by an electronic brush sweeping wide surfaces of several meters, depositing a thin film of paint.

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His last work produced for this exhibition, Pollock, Blowing Bubbles, is an a priori abstract painting whose surface, machine-painted, has the velvety quality of Renaissance painting. Gigantic evocation of an all-over by Pollock, it is, in fact, only the reproduction of a small wooden tablet which accidentally served as a support for a paint can. After having surveyed his entrails, Alain Jacquet today throws his probe into the vast field of repressed images. This work opens without doubt a new period, which remains for the time being a question mark.

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