Jean-Michel Sanejouand

The work

Whole
1988
195 x 130 cm
Acrylic on canvas

The color has disappeared, only black on white remains, and the forms have been reduced to a minimum: incomplete strokes made with a single gesture. Spread over the white canvas are shapes made with black paint applied with various sizes of rollers, the traces of which can be discerned. This creates very simple forms, with a marked primitivism that is accentuated by a kind of symmetrical face-mask around which the aforementioned strokes are arranged as if they were parts of the body of a figure wielding a tool, perhaps a brush or a pen.

The artist

(Lyon, 1934 – Baugé-en-Anjou, 2021)

After beginning his career in abstraction, he abandoned painting in 1962 and focused on the creation of objects, installations, and volumetric forms. Beginning in 1968, he returned to painting in his work.
This work is a reduction, a synthesis of the work the artist produced since 1968, depicting grotesque figures with certain humorous touches. It can be included among the so-called “Black and White Paintings,” created between 1986 and 1992.