Cosmic Urbanization
By Aurore Jesset *
The recent paintings by Jean-Paul Hébrard sparkle with a rhythm that seduces the eye.
Fragmented celestial matter seems to float in outer space.
The artist's works immerse us in a geometric universe situating our terrestrial experience of the urban environment by the familiar elements that surround us.
The three-dimensional character of pictorial creations or " bas-reliefs ”By the artist testifies to his enlightened practice of sculpture.
Here, the gaze is enveloped by the balance of the composition between the full, the empty,
fragile areas, color tints, and black lines as if in calligraphy.
Jean-Paul Hébrard succeeds in a warm geometrization by the harmony and the dynamics which dominate the whole. Air, water, plants and the urban dance life,
from the fragment to the whole, from the real to the signifier. Codes (colors, graphics) are articulated to translate our daily environment in a symbolic transposition rich in combinations to discover. These are declined as a language whose structure is revealed little by little.
The movement is given by the contrast between the thickness of the lines, the assumed colors and the ventilation of the blank spaces. Thus, passageways emerge as a gentle invitation to circulate in a landscape with multiple points of view evoking cubism.
Jean-Paul Hébrard's approach reflects plastic expertise and a serious knowledge of the history of art. Among his many sources of inspiration, his work is marked by two luminous artistic encounters. Jan Voss, a multidisciplinary artist of German origin, enlightens him with his sense of composition.
Then, he discovered the American, Shirley Jaffe, a major figure in contemporary art.
The research of our plastic artist oriented by the non-figurative geometric composition also bears the obvious accent of the constructivism of the beginning of the last century. Notably, Lissitzky's approach is a benchmark.
Since prehistoric times, artists have felt the need to stylize their representation of the world through geometry. It has always provided benchmarks for understanding space and its properties.
Thus, the visual artist, Jean-Paul Hébrard reconnects us with ancestral practices and reminds us that art is never isolated from collective history and the evolutions that it encounters. His work by its modernity invites an original conception of topology, that of the places of our daily life constantly experimenting with the bridges connecting the parts and the structure, the particle to the universe, an approach inscribed in the very process of the living and the living. history of civilizations.
