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My friend Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul Perrenx was my best friend for many years. We met in the mid-1990s in Mâcon, where I was working as an archaeologist. His art appealed to me immediately. Maybe in general you should separate the person of an artist from his work. The better you know someone, the more difficult it becomes. With Perrenx it's impossible anyway, so much is his painting the reflection of his being. Jean-Paul was free, wild, spontaneous and non-conformist. But he was also enough for himself. He was what he was, his paintings what they were, whether you liked them or not. Colours? Yes, colours! Which ones? It doesn't matter! The ones he had at hand. The right technique? But always! Jean-Paul loved the rough, but also the delicate. He was a great experimenter. Reusing old set pieces and painting over old pictures? Whenever you want. A star of collage. Different pigment densities, more or less rapid drying, deliberate craquelure, rare painting agents, e.g. coffee.

Jean-Paul painted in series. The repetitive is one of his trademarks. The variation of a theme once found. To the point of fatigue. And what about the content? Women, over and over again women. Between love and object of desire. Threatened couples tied to each other, often protected by big and strong animals, like lions. People and animals in all kinds of variations. Marked with signs. Just like in prehistoric cave paintings, but perhaps as a prehistorian I must inevitably come across these connections. In any case, Perrenx's painting is primitive in a positive sense and revolves around central human themes. She is interested in instincts, the opposite sex and the relationship between humans and animals. Objects and landscapes are only incidental. Just like in the art of the Palaeolithic picture caves. It is difficult to categorise Perrenx's art. Of course there is something expressive about his art, a wild use of colour and swirling lines, but does that make him an expressionist? I think not. The key lies in the stoic nature, the original content and above all the serial and repetitive character. Jean-Paul Perrenx was autistic and his painting was "brut". In his isolation, any orientation towards the current art world was unimportant to him. Conceptual art was anathema to him. It is clear that Perrenx is a classic example of an art brut artist. Jean-Paul was simply a painter of the human, timeless, wild and beautiful.

Harald Floss, June 2023 Prehistorian at the University of Tübingen. Photo: The author (left) and Jean-Paul Perrenx in autumn 1998 in the garden of our house in Azé near Mâcon. Photo: Hans Floss.

Article by Alain Sève on the painting of Jean-Paul Perrenx

Taking as his starting point a drawing from the "Assembled Characters" series, Alain Sève shows the influence of Fauvism and Expressionism on the work of Jean-Paul Perrenx.

Text by Alain Sève for the exhibition "On the trail of the lions at Solutré". - [2014]

Exhibition organised on the site of Solutré (71) in July 2014: "Attention "serial and genial painter". The year 1950 saw the birth of a character named Jean Paul Perrenx. He attended the Dijon School of Fine Arts for five years in the 1970s and then, with his national diploma of fine arts in hand, he began to paint, paint, and paint again and again (all the while practising his profession as a teacher of plastic arts, one must make a living). From his bulimic passion for painting are born works which are as many "sticks of coloured dynamite" which explode in our faces revealing us "his world" where the human being is omnipresent, for our greatest happiness. If we were to classify this "unclassifiable" character in a current or a school, we could say that he is in the movement of expressionism, in the wake of Jawlensky, Kirchner and other Munch. But his work is so singular that it doesn't fit into any box! And that's so much the better !

If a dream haunts him during a restless night's sleep, a canvas appears in the morning, then two, then three, then ten, then a hundred, until the subject is exhausted, or until he is appeased. An obsessive painting, a work revisited over and over again, dissected and searched. This is how Jean Paul Perrenx's dizzying series of "Assembled Characters" came into being, more than three hundred paintings to question the couple, then the thirty-four "Heads to Heads" and again the forty "Window Characters" and what can be said of the one thousand five hundred "Faces", the "Women of the Bridge", the "Adopting Couples" with their procession of Douanier Rousseau, Cézanne, Babar, Pinocchio or Vermeer and finally the one hundred and thirty "Benevolent Lions" who watch over the sleep of these "Sleepers in the grass". Dare I draw a parallel with the work of a certain "Pablo P" who also revisited Manet's "Déjeuner sur l'herbe", Delacroix's "Women of Algiers" and Velasquez's "Meninas" many times?

He has presented and exhibited his work in numerous galleries and salons, both in France and abroad. The Greuze Museum in Tournus has even devoted an exhibition to him. As for his works, they are now in numerous private collections in France, Germany, Spain, etc... And behind this "serial painter" hides a man of great sensitivity, oh so endearing, a man juggling with words as well as with colours, a poet, in short, a restless poet but whose inner wealth is equal to his talent.

Portrait of my brother by Joëlle - Episode 1

"Jean-Paul was born in the middle of the 20th century, in 1950, in the middle of the year, on the 20th of June, in Sétif in French Algeria. Sétif is a small town, hot in summer, cold in winter, with tree-lined streets, shops under the arcades, and flourishing gardens. His grandparents, the Martys and the Perrenxes, lived in the "cité des cheminots". Both grandfathers, Marceau Marty and Julien Perrenx, worked together, both driving steam locomotives. The grandmothers, Marie Marty and Jeanne Perrenx, were neighbours and friends. Naturally, the children of these two close families, seven brothers and sisters in the Perrenx family and four in the Marty family, grew up together in a friendly, good-natured atmosphere. This is how Jean-Paul's parents met. Eugène and Marcelle were married on 8 January 1949, to the great joy of their parents. Jean-Paul grew up in a loving family, spoiled by his grandfather Marceau who transferred all his love to his grandson, knowing that a few years earlier, the Marty family had lost, in very painful conditions, a son named Jean-Paul. He had been bitten by a rabid dog. After the birth of a little sister, Joëlle in 1954, and several moves, the family settled in Kouba, a suburb of Algiers. My memories start here.

In this neighbourhood in Kouba, the Perrenx family lived on the top floor (4th perhaps) of an old building with a terrace above where the women of the building hung out their washing. The sun was so strong that everything dried in the blink of an eye! Downstairs, beautiful white villas were lined up, protected from the burning sun by orange trees and jasmines with strong perfumes. In the street, French and Arab children played together in complete camaraderie. Jean-Paul had a friend, Abdellah, Joëlle had a girlfriend, Biba [...].

In this same district of Kouba, lived friends of the Perrenxes, the Boirie (Georges and Andrée) and their 3 children: Martine the eldest, Jean-Paul and Joëlle (fashionable names in the 1950s!) They lived in a beautiful, large villa where Joëlle and Jean-Paul Perrenx went to play. Another friend, Tony, was also part of the happy and noisy little troupe. Jean-Paul and Tony would sometimes put on a clown show and all the other children would sit on the floor and clap and laugh. Jean-Paul was a happy, bright and mischievous child, often teasing his little sister.