Exhibition in Mâcon in 2004
Article "Les mille et un visages de Jean-Paul Perrenx" by Monic Coutheron: "The contrast between the massive silhouette of Depardieu and the softness of his gaze is surprising. After visiting the exhibition, he agrees to pose, somewhat solemnly, between two canvases, two giant and lunar faces. It is at this moment that we think we have found one of the keys to the Perrenx enigma. Last year, he was already in Cluny and many people wondered about his series of "sleepers" where the same scene was painted over and over again, identical in theme, but unique each time. The lion and the sleepers are in the same place but the colours, the contrasts and the lights change and make one forget the previous one to merge entirely into the last one.
Jean-Paul Perrenx always works by themes and he obstinately repeats the same painting over and over again. He repeats it, like a pianist playing scales whose sounds change colour and universe. He can paint from 30 to 300 canvases on the same subject. He cannot explain this repetitive gesture, he only knows that he has to do it. Yet each canvas tells a new story, and the faces change constantly, from astonishment to contemplation or from a smile to immense melancholy.
For this exhibition, Jean-Paul has chosen only a few paintings from each series. There are couples, either side by side, head to head, or dancing, or with arms intertwined and forming a kind of human weave. There is also the series of pre-Columbian-styleiraffe-women in shades of purple and blue or suddenly multicoloured and enigmatic under a shower of shooting stars in a purple sky. Everything seems to be a pretext for colour, which explodes on each canvas, spread out in luminous green or red, or broken down into more intimate stained glass. One is somewhat disturbed by these dozens of silhouettes leaning over our passage. But if, as we leave, we meet the gaze of Jean-Paul Perrenx, standing there between the two giant faces, we are struck by the strange similarity of his gentle and open gaze with all those seen there. Who are they for him, these eternally lost and found half-brothers? His reflection or his double?
Exhibition in Cluny in 1986
Extract from an article by Claude Mellul: "Fifty-three paintings from a dream laboratory. However, this is not a pale reminiscence of surrealism, everything is perfectly figurative, but each object, each character undergoes the twists and metamorphoses of the dream, the bird invades the sky, the boat curves, the heavy no longer weighs. And we apprehend this universe exactly as we would a dream, with the double paradoxical sensation of finding ourselves inside a world that is both known and radically strange. It seems that reality, absorbed by the gaze, resized by the unconscious, now comes out much truer and much more beautiful.
In this dreamlike garland, the themes multiply, unlimited, everything is a pretext for painting. Some, however, predominate and take hold as soon as they find a small free space on the canvas, nature for example, and in particular the sky and water, which invade a large part of the work with their barely distinguishable fluidity. The animals, with a mixed bestiary of foxes, monkeys, horses and cats. But the most obsessive theme is undoubtedly that of the woman, in her radiant magic. She reigns, but from a mysterious reign of penumbra, suggestion and ideal, probably inaccessible in the mirage of her contours.
In his representation of the world, Jean-Paul Perrenx is armed with all the skills, all the processes are familiar to him, but the exhibition at the Malgouverne allows us to identify a certain stylistic consistency. While remaining deeply lyrical, fantastic and somewhat tortured, his feverish work retains aspects of naive art. There is a taste of resurgent childhood, a joyful candour that simplifies the silhouettes and sets the colours on fire.
It is indeed a spontaneous art. The work is never the result of a long elaboration, it springs forth. There is no preliminary, no sketch, no research into composition. Watching this painter work, one has the impression that the work is born miraculously from the caress of the brush on the canvas, as if he himself had no control over anything, overflowing with the vitality of his creative force [...] ".
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