Jean Le Gac

The work

Fragment 13
1990
116 x 163 cm
mixed media on canvas, photograph and 11 manuscripts

Le Gac’s work combines painting, photography, text and narration to create pieces that are both autobiographical and fictional.
All the handwritten documents reveal his thoughts mixed with notes that seem to be taken from a diary. The photographs are of himself combined with painted drawings.
The texts invite reading, but it is not easy. At first glance, there may seem to be no connection between them, which should prompt the viewer to find it or participate in the creative game.
Everything points to a preliminary script for a film or a narrative in the making.
As he himself states, behind all his work there is a constant reflection and investigation into the relationship between the work and the artist.

The artist

(Alès, France, 1936)

Jean Le Gac is a conceptual artist, painter and photographer who uses mixed media, often video or photography and text, to document his investigations and sketched scenes.
His poetic photographic interventions, in which he is often the main subject, are accompanied by typewritten text describing the story underlying the artwork or by handwritten notes on the artwork itself. A member of the narrative art movement since the 1970s, Le Gac often tells a story about an imaginary character whom viewers can easily identify with the artist himself. He calls it a “metaphor for painting”. Le Gac also uses the artist’s book as a central part of his artistic practice.
As in many of his other works, the simultaneous use of text and image allows Le Gac to draw us into his poetic imagination, transporting viewers on his inner journeys filled with trains, dreams, plants, pastels and photographs, the traces of real and imaginary wanderings. A typical work of this type is ‘Le Roman d’Aventure’, created in 1972, which Le Gac calls ‘photo-texts’, in which he depicts himself as the painter searching for an elusive character he never catches and as the narrator behind the camera documenting his desperate search. He speaks of himself in the third person and pursues his own elusive dream of becoming a painter.