Jonathan Delachaux, Série Noire (Black series).
The composition, the technical skill, the color palette, the photorealistic aspect and the style of Jonathan Delachaux constitute a unique ensemble, mark of a talented painter. However, on first glance his work appears to the spectator to be subject-derivative, because the same subjects are represented on each canvas, riveting repetition : three puppets, three fictive persons : Naïma Bourquin, Johan Wacquez, and Vassili Lavandier.
Jonathan Delachaux crafts their biographies, their coherence with care ; Jonathan Delachaux makes the sculptures mature daily, and they are photographed for the realization of each painting. The sculptures do not benefit from the same realistic treatment as the paintings—they manifest the traces of their precursors…: they remain the puppets, the marionettes that they are. As in every fantastical scenario, the obsession to fix inanimate objects creates an unavoidable uneasiness for the beholder—despite the naivety of their appearance, we are reminded of the role of effigies in ancient rites, as outlets : they are burned in public carnivals, they are manipulated in black magic, pierced in voodoo, children make them live secret lives…. This ambiguity is present in all of Jonathan Delachaux’s work in as much as he employs situations and tropes of theatre, masks, and cross dressing…
His compositions are thus tinged with drama, the attitudes are posed, maudlin, indeed the effect of a will of a puppeteer, an avalanche of authentic fakes, of mirrors, false doubles, failed doubles and falsifications result, each with their consequential scenaristic effects.
In the passport series, the three personages are purported to plan a trip to Berlin to be at the exhibition of the artist at the Swiss Embassy, but they realize that their passports have expired and that they don’t have the time to have them renewed. They thus proceed to modify them on their own: Johan, who is very conscientious, uses Photoshop, Naïma carefully proceeds by hand using white-out, and Vassili, who as usual has missed the point, uses a marker to scratch out the old date and replace it with a new one. Three characters, but also three paintings, three ways of representing the disposal of an administrative document, which is by nature “authentic,” and also the inclusion of digital printouts, of written manuscripts, of passport photographs into the scope of the canvas. The “double” failure is a vital mechanism of the work where imperfection of illusionism is considered as formal elements.
Jonathan Delachaux’s painting technique is very specific: he paints on plastic film which is then transferred onto canvas. He paints in a “reverse” manner—actually facing the future public instead of in the traditional role of the artist as a spectator confronted with/by his own “oeuvre”—where his role as necromancer trumps a shared vision with the future audience. His colors hues are firstly applied onto the film transparently, in a wash tint; next comes the black, white, and gray values—the painting surface is obscured by the successive layers, concealing the drawing from the painter’s eye. Each painting requires roughly one hundred layers, a process that, despite the painting’s punctilious complexity, requires a leap of blind faith as it were, in the potential viability of each scene. The plastic film is then turned over to reveal to the painter, as to the future spectator, the entire painting, which is then laid on canvas and the plastic film pealed off.
The fact that the personages are painted in the same way as their surroundings aides in their integration into their photorealistic environment; the technique of treating the values and hues in opposition to one another cedes to a strong chiaroscuro that further reinforces the theatricality of the work, an overall hallucinatory representation. The clinical lighting of his personages suggests an in-vitro experiment, test-tube babies—a theme often evoked, often painted.
The use of plastic film gives an impossibly smooth quality, a frontal and definitive image that bolsters the ineluctable presence of his personages, their absolute legitimacy in their world—a world dictated by hidden laws, and in which painting permits the coexistence of the most disparate elements. Jonathan Delachaux’s paintings are composed with varying layers of reality—the paintings are created en bloc, by the transfer of one fine layer of acrylic, a question of a few millimeters—the paintings appear just to happen. And yet the care and delicacy that go into painting the shadows cast by the window grating in the artist’s studio, Vassili’s eyes, …, seem to express a desire to create and animate a living universe full of stories, details, coherence. Despite all these dramatic tropes, these adventures, these canvases remain still-lifes penetrated by the stillness of things.
