GALERIE DROSTE PARIS
18 RUE DUSSOUBS
75002 PARIS, FRANCE
Julien Jaca revilsits and hijack outsider art in his very own cathartic urge, paying no heed to aesthetic perfection. By colliding pop figures and naive illustrations with each other, the artist becomes a myth-maker. Using some archetypes for their immediate symbolism, he stages personal and familiar icons in almost photograph-like frontal poses. In these figurative pictures, the artist twirls 70’s US culture imagery, female nudes, and naive art’s primitivism around. Although he distances himself from tattooing, its presence remains pervasive, and he creates a mise en abyme of the tattoo flash in his first solo exhibition with the title Pots: pigments of naked skin, ornaments on giant vases.
The artist does not limit himself to paint what he sees. He paints a profound portrait of his favorite people and objects to create iconic images against haloing electrical backgrounds—neither outdated, nor futuristic.
By initiating this deliberately explosive visual rhetoric, both familiar and enigmatic, insolent and serious, contemporary and ancestral, Jaca offers the viewer the choice of a reading as protean and freed as his work.
Text by Timothée Chevalier.
Julien Jaca, born 1985 in Toulouse (FR) lives and works in Hossegor (FR). He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Toulouse.