J.M. Robert

"A Pas Feutrés" Quiet Steps

2017

JM Robert was born and raised in Macon, a small country town in the French region of Burgundy in 1987. JM Robert started painting at a very young age before getting an Art and decoration degree at the Beaux-Arts School in Paris. He studied graphic design and décor at the Métiers d'Art in Paris where he learned and refined his technique, in particular, that of trompe l'oeil. Today he strives to create paintings that draw from his experiences from a young age, expanding into impressive and powerful canvases. His work is characterized by a pictorial act in two phases. He first uses different techniques such as graffiti, scratching and scraping with knives and trowels to mimic the effects of patina, dirt, and degradation. Following the fluidity of this first layer, a face begins to appear in the eyes of the artist before he begins to paint his muse. He then hand-draws this face in black to simulate stencil work. Scarcely evoked, the facial features are already vanishing. It seems that the faces were sketched, but did not have time to be completely formed. It is also a trace of an anonymous passage, a presence that is fragile, precarious, and always feminine. His abstract backgrounds of bright and flashy colors contrast with the black graphic by which he captures characteristic expressions of female faces. On his canvases, colors burst into a myriad of fragments that no longer manage to find their meaning to take shape. The use of vivid colors often help to classify his work in the category of pop art but he crosses the boundaries of style to create pieces which exude a timeless emotion, bridging classical and contemporary, creating a completely unique style of his own. Ruins and damaged walls of big cities full of rough-cast, bits of tags and old posters fascinate him and became the source of his inspiration. What is the passage of time? What is left of our presence in a place? What trace do we leave of our passage on earth? These are the questions that artist JM Robert raises in his works. There are sad, joyful, sometimes distant looks. But these faces are always in the hope of something, a trace of life in a chaotic setting as in Pompeii or Hiroshima, Robert wants to represent the shadow of these figures. He picks up these feminine faces from everyday life, in his opinion, they bear witness of our time.