JEAN-CHARLES EUSTACHE

Jean-Charles Eustache's paintings are executed in acrylic on wood, with an extreme attention to the surface, almost diaphanous, perfectly matte, structured by grids of whitish, pastel tones, essentially made of gray milky tints. His work is circumscribed to small formats, requiring the viewer to pay close attention to the surface. His paintings have a very special relationship with the gaze, with the way an image inscribes itself, vibrates, partially disappears, asserts itself simultaneously as truth and lie, allows itself to be contained while at the same time escaping. Apparently, there are two main periods in his work, often hastily assimilated to a figurative period followed by a second period during which he turned to abstraction. The first period - until 2014 - was devoted to representing memories, recalling places and landscapes in Guadeloupe, where he spent the first years of his childhood before being sent to an institute for the visually impaired in metropolitan France. Then, since 2015, there would be a second period, marked by a notable change, in which figurative painting would take second place to abstract paintings made up of grids, flat tints of color and trompe-l'œil reliefs. 

And yet, there's nothing "abstract" about these paintings. Jean-Charles Eustache's painting is an experience of proximity, detail and fragility. About them, he evokes a "question of measure and fragmentation, repetition and variation, overlapping and interlocking, temporality through the gap between different elements, the organization of solids and voids, the play of shadows and light." Paintings are not images, and it's important to remember this, because beauty is not born of images, but of surface, depth, light and the narrative of a gaze. Images have a surface, but their surface sinks like a ship to the depths of the ocean. We are helpless sailors under a deluge of images, no longer able to see the waves and searching in vain for the backwash and swell when we are already drowned at the bottom of the waters. This is undoubtedly why it's so beautiful to look at these works, which strive to put images overboard, to build the makeshift rafts of the gaze, to resurface. Jean-Charles Eustache is a painter who doesn't produce images. His paintings, barely larger than the hand that gave birth to them, offer a smooth, matte surface worthy of an Italian primitive with an unconditional passion for his expanses. His paintings are neither figurative nor abstract, and when they compose meticulously ordered grids, they reflect a time dedicated to the observation of walls or facades caressed by sunlight. We're reminded of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca and the tactility of the decorative geometric grisaille frescoes in Villa Poppaea, near Naples, in the 1st century. Light settles, duration stretches, as the sun's flamboyance fades to its last candlestick flickers. The light, its modulations, slowly revealed the stone's reliefs and hollows, giving a chalk-like consistency to the surface, to the hours, to the elusive extinction of day, making the imperceptible blueness of the surface blossom, diminishing its light rose hue to a vesper color.

Jean-Charles Eustache is a graduate of the Clermont-Ferrand Art School. His work is included in a number of public and private collections (FRAC Auvergne, Centre national des arts plastiques, Fondation Colas). They have been exhibited at the FRAC Auvergne, which devoted a major monograph to him in 2021, as well as in numerous group shows (Musée Paul Dini, Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix, FRAC Auvergne, Fondation Vuitton, Centre d'Art Contemporain de Meymac, Le Magasin, Grenoble, Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard, Glassbox, Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Centre d'Art Contemporain Le Creux de l'enfer).  He lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand.