Jean Le Gac

To celebrate the release of Jean Le Gac’s catalogue raisonne, Galerie Daniel Templon is proud to present a short survey of the artist’s work, from his famous seventies hoto-texts to his more recent works and his latest project with the city of Vence.

Several of his seminal and most important pieces, such as «Decor» (1972) or «The Painter» (1973) will be seen for the first time in over thirty years. In the seventies, while many artists of his generation focused on language and philosophy, Jean Le Gac chose to dive into fiction. Inspired by the litterary movement «nouveau roman» (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor …), Jean Le Gac created a fictitious character « the Painter ». Sometimes decribed as a «fleeting selfportait», the Painter acted as both an alter ego and a double, who led his own life sometimes punctated by extraordinary adventures.

Jean Le Gac was among the first French artists who mixed fiction and reality, autobiography and fantasy. Like his friends Christian Boltanski, Paul-Christian Gette or Annette Messager, Jean Le Gac built intimate myths, every day life novels, where the Painter embodied the perfect «anti-hero» figure.

His most recent series of works such as «The Screen» (2001), «Vence works » (2002-2003) or «The trip» (2003-04) are direct products of these early experiments. In the «Vence Works », which were commissioned by the city of Vence in the South of France, Jean Le Gac represents himself as an explorer, who gathers and reinterprets the many stories and myths around the city.

His works are thus a collection of diverse elements: pastel drawings, oil or pencil sketches, objects, photographs of chosen sites, as well as texts relating a story or describing the context. The originality of Le Gac’s work stems precisely from this unsual mix of genre: « great art », pictures from children’s books, art sociology, popular novels, conceptual practices and fiction writing. As the art critic Bernard Marcadé wrote, Jean Le Gac’s œuvre is can be compared to a « genealogy of painting ».

Jean Le Gac has been widely exhibited worldwide; in the US (Museum of Modern Art, John Gibson Gallery, New York), Italy, Germany, Belgium, and France (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris). He has been represented by Galerie Templon for 35 years.

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Jean Le Gac "photo-texts and recent works"