Jean Messagier

Original, midcentury poster dated 1975 from Gallerie Lovreglio in Nice, France. Signed by the artist Jean Messagier (1920-1999), multi-faceted artist. Measures: 17" W × 1" D × 24" H "Like the meanders of the Doubs so dear to Jean Messagier, the furrows that the artists on the paths of art history are sometimes complex and tortuous. Messagier, famous since the 1950s, exhibited all over the world, a friend of painters, rockstars and poets, began the 1980s with a retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palace (Paris) which then marks, paradoxically, the beginning of a certain forgetfulness. The reasons are many times that today the work of this immense artist is partly forgotten, in all unknown cases, and is probably the object of a misunderstanding. Messagier, abstract? Arise then these images of colorful tracery, this so-called "tile washer" painting, which was, he, is true, that of her first successes and her consecration, but which is only one of facets of a gigantic and protean work that has endlessly put itself in danger and to reinvent herself. The object of the retrospective imagined at the Musée de Dole in 2019 is clearly to show that Messagier was working beyond the issues of figuration and of abstraction, in an urgency to paint, to draw, to create, which has as principal obsession to respond to the cruel creativity of nature. Messagier, springtime specialist, ecologist almost before the hour, experimenter of frost painting winter, poet of the sap and pollen, draws his breath in that, vital, libidinal of nature. It's the same energy that pushed him to touch everything, with a freedom and a lack of interest manifest for opinion or criticism. It does not matter if we say crazy - on the contrary - Messagier the almost American abstract painter never finished with the figure or the figuration and allowed herself as early as the 1970s to both summon images from the popular culture like Goldorak, the Marsupilami, Betty Boop, glamorous figures like Lady Di or Greta Garbo, to jostle her masters by quoting Delacroix, Matisse, Picasso ... with total irreverence. These years 1970-1980, where will face jovial triviality, fried eggs, radishes, a thousand giant leafs...