Jacques Monory

The Works

ANG. N. 5
1997
250 x 390 cm
Oil on canvas and plywood

This work belongs to the ANG series, consisting of six works created between 1997 and 1999 in no chronological order: ANG. no. 5 is from 1997, while ANG. n. 1 is from 1999.
The painting is a diptych with two wooden panels added, one at the bottom left and one at the bottom right, made of the same material.
The title ANG. refers to the first three letters of the French words Ange (Angel) and Angoisse (Anxiety). The series confronts the contradiction between the two words.
Against the almost black navy blue background, crossed by narrow zigzag lines resembling cracks and other irregular geometric surfaces, a sunny yellow filters through, revealing parts of palm leaves. Two human figures occupy opposite diagonal positions: a man sitting with his elbows on a table, contemplating the scene, and a woman lying at the foot of a staircase.
In the center, in a box, a revolver held by a female hand points in our direction. On the right-hand side, we see a thin, sharp metal spike curved like a fishhook. From the left, a pair of hands with white gloves and black sleeves with white shirt cuffs enter the frame, holding six dice with the letters and numbers of the work’s title. On the right, in the lower half, a blue female figure is in the act of standing up.
It seems necessary for the viewer to know that this is the same figure that Monory created in 1997 for an installation entitled Take a breath/We must remove the angels from the churches, which he made in the church of the Charles Foix Hospital in Ivry-sur-Seine. It is the image of a fleeing angel, freed from his condition as a guardian angel.

Baiser No. 15 (multiple no. 1/3)
(Kiss No. 15, multiple no. 1/3)
2000
50 x 50 cm
Screen Print

Against a background of this color in which the white crests of ocean waves can be seen, we see in the foreground the two heads of a couple embracing in a passionate kiss. Like the last scene of a movie, the tension of an unknown plot is released by the kiss. We don’t see their faces: she is facing away, and he has a narrow black stripe over his eyes. Superimposed on the imagined frame, a technical white number creates distance between the viewer and the warmth of the scene.
This is also the function of blue: to cool the tension and latent violence in some of his paintings, frames cut from the long film of his life, hidden or disguised within the atmosphere of the detective genre. References to travel, the motel, the highway, and open spaces seen from the car coexist in an atmosphere of flight and danger.
It is interesting to reflect on the psychic process that generates his work, the relationships between the unconscious and the dialectic of images. By appropriating images made by others or by himself years before, he creates something new. Hence its character, which is simultaneously autobiographical on the one hand and original on the other.

The artist

(Paris, 1924 -2018)

Jacques Monory adopted the new photographic and experimental film languages of the 50s of the twentieth century. Camera in hand, with the complicity of friends such as the editor Robert Delpire or the photographer Robert Frank, he became a chronicler of his own daily life, meticulously recording everything he saw on his travels, his obsessions, dreams, close friends and family, describing a blue world with a pigment created and patented by him, the Blue Monory, signature of much of his work.
Blue cools the tension and latent violence in his paintings, frames cut from the film of his life, disguised with the atmosphere of the detective genre in an atmosphere of escape and danger.
Jacques Monory’s career was linked to Narrative Figuration. Young artists of the 60s from a cosmopolitan generation, stimulated by the strength of the new mass media, the press, comics, films and advertising with a strong interest in the ideological and political debates of those years. This group, of which Monory was a prominent figure, recovered figuration, closely linking it to new social and communicative attitudes. His works sought to condense a narrative into an image.
Hence its name, Narrative Figuration, born and developed in parallel with Anglo-Saxon pop art and the Nouveaux Réalistes promoted by the critic Pierre Restany.