Jacques Monory

Born in 1934 in Paris (FR)
Lives and works in Cachan (FR)

  

Tableau à vendre n°4

1976
Acrylic on canvas
92 x 65 cm
Purchased in: 1984

Jacques Monory is a representative of Narrative Figuration, that school invented in 1964 by the critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, as an echo of American Pop Art. However, Monory’s work shows a complexity which has inspired scholarly commentaries from important intellectuals. The artist himself says that he tends to see life in a dramatic way. Throughout his work, there reigns the tension of a ‘topicality’ (crimes, murders…) that is barely embroidered. Paradoxically, these exploded visions also contain a certain tenderness. Monory is a painter first and foremost, and his painting, he says, unlike that of his contemporaries, ‘is not dry’. The palette is usually reduced to a blue that has become his trademark but it would be futile to seek, in his work, the conceptual radicalness of an artist like Yves Klein. The artist is too attached to living fables, from which he takes things in an enigmatic way, as if he were isolating a photogram from a fiction film.
Tableau à vendre n° 4 (Picture for Sale no. 4) is divided into two parts: at the bottom, clasped hands, at the top, a rectangular screen seen in perspective. This construction is not a mere collage; it features a real space, perhaps a screening room, which lends likelihood to the endless repetition of an image within an image, a vast landscape (a waterfall) treated in a somewhat stylized way. In the foreground, two female hands with manicured nails caress the hand of another woman. All extrapolations are possible: narrative, for Monory, represents an open fantasy machine.

^{Olivier Goetz}

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