These are mostly large drawings made over a period of fifteen years, from 1980 to 1998, which present an obsessive theme: that of a (fused) couple, sometimes tied together, carried on a kind of 'flying bed' that floats in a surreal space.
Text by Jean-Paul Perrenx : "I have been painting these "Suspended Characters" for 6 to 7 years and almost obsessively. I exploit all the pictorial possibilities of this undertaking by a repetitive approach. I want each painting to be different from the previous one in form and colour as well as in the atmosphere created. For me, these characters are walking, motionless, inside the infinite cosmos. They are suspended between space and time like passing birds. Faces impassive or serene, they look without seeing in their arabesques buttoned up to the collar. I have the impression that the couples formed in this way are still numb, curled up, curled up and dressed as they should be on the sheet of paper. They are also, eventually, chrysalises and sarcophagi.
Another text by Jean-Paul Perrenx: "I paint painstakingly and meticulously on small formats of 3 cm x 2. The embryonic canvas then undergoes a slow evolution, a painful mutation, and then, it is the birth. Once it has hatched, I wait a few more weeks to uproot the work. I exhibit my paintings as buds. The format has grown inordinately, to about 1.20 x 0.80 m. The couples formed in this way are still numb, curled up, cuddled up. Others, tied up and dressed as they should be to the last watermark, go in strips on the sheet of paper. The sarcophaguses and cocoons. It will take several more years for the man and woman, with arabesques buttoned up to the collar, to be cut cleanly, between life and death, between the soles of the feet and the earth. And on your papyrus, you are either mummies or Russian dolls.
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