Galerie Lara Vincy.

Extended until Saturday, May 10th included. Open Thursday, May 8th, opening hours: 11am - 1pm and 2.30 - 7pm

For his sixth one-man show in the Galerie Lara Vincy, in his usual bi-annual rhythm of even years, Jean-Luc Parant is offering us his vision of the imaginary museum, in the wake of his exhibition « Mots & Merveilles » (Words and Marvels) (2012) in which he had already included part of his private collections, within his visual artworks: transposed butterfly wings, pearly manuscripts, illuminated musical scores... Jean-Luc Parant has once again delved into his own collections to find some treasures, in order to let us see some aspects of his own personal imaginary museum: ancient geographical maps, outlines of friendly hands, illustrated books’ pages, etchings, etc.  Thus he created an order within the disorder of his accumulations of objects of every kind: an order within the gallery’s space. But equally creating disorder: in the overturned times of ancient objects of every age and in the current drawings that Jean-Luc Parant applies to them, in the superposing and covering up of the various chronologies. Disorderliness once again, within the distance expressed between, on the one hand the reproductions (maps, etchings, etc.) which become the supports on which the artist is working, and,  on the other hand, the original gestures of the artist at work.
Jean-Luc Parant’s imaginary museum is the representation he makes of beauty, of silence, of the rarity and preciousness of things. In a re-ordering of objects, documents or various collections, like a montage of a singular and spiritual album, Jean-Luc Parant retains, files, lists everything simultaneously. He becomes in turn curator, guardian or guide of the imaginary museum, that timeless mental space that he has patiently set up like a rampart against the flight of time, and like a museum of the imaginary, that space for all the possible shapes offered to creativity. Jean-Luc Parant, ever mobile, opens up all the images, all the objects he loves to his own imaginary, and he invites us to look at them over and over again, as if he sought to liberate in them, and under our eyes, their coore of energies and their power of upheaval.

Kristell Loquet, February 2014

Translated by Ann Cremin

Still available the book Mots et Merveilles (Les éditions de l’Œil, published in september 2013) which 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 Parantosaure(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.

Le salon du dessin contemporain / Drawing Now 2014, Le Carreau du Temple, March 26 - 30,  stand B 9   : J. - L. Parant (en focus), recent books signature on the booth - Drawing Night Friday, March 28 from 6 to 10pm

With the kind support of vinetculture.fr