Galerie Lara Vincy.

Jean-Luc Parant is the author of hundreds of texts on the eyes, and of hundreds of thousands of nodules, be they in wax, clay or paper.  Writing on eyes might have resulted on a single book concerning eyes, in the same way as creating nodules might have been summed in a single nodule; if the texts and the nodules which followed the first text and the first nodule had been a repetition of the earlier ones.  But Jean-Luc Parant never wrote the same text twice, nor did he make the same nodule twice.  He just brought into play, since he started creating them, the same energy for developing one or the other in their circuits, made up of twists and turns, and in their sentences made up of escapes and flights of fancy. 

 

The publication to-day, published by the Editions de l’Œil, is an overview of the five exhibitions devoted to his work shown in the Lara Vincy gallery, between 2004 and 2012.  After introducing us to the inner workings of his touch and of his body (the show Boules ? in 2004 had shown us the origin of the spheres that he has modeled with his hands for more than forty years), the inside of his sight and of his head (with the exhibitions of his library of books in wax and in clay, entitled Bibliothèque idéale et (L)ivres de nuit in 2006 and 2008), then the innards of the fantastic animal that dwells within him (le ou les Prantosaure(s) in 2010), he explored in 2012, on the occasion of his exhibition Mots et Merveilles, the visual possibilities of the « marvels » or « curiosities » (ancient herb gardens, naturalized animals, used envelopes, musical scores…), that he has been instinctively and passionately collecting for ever by swallowing them, by absorbing them, to finally let us see them anew, in perspectives that are as poetical as they are unexpected.

 

Jean-Luc Parant thus sums up his unusual approach: "With my nodules, that I have never ceased manufacturing for more than 40 years, I simply represented that which is overturned in the world every day.  My nodules in heaps, my landslide, are only a kind of "realistic" painting that would provide the most accurate image of what is unceasingly repeated and transformed around us, because in time, everything falls apart."

Kristell Loquet, 2013

Translated in English by Ann Cremin