The fading of civilisation and the emergence of the new world | Jean-Luc Blanchet

Removing, removing, removing, removing, undoing, subtracting, but also washing, scrubbing, cleaning, these are the options chosen by Jean-Luc Blanchet when he developed his painting in the mid-90s. More often than not, using rags, he wipes away the black matter to make images appear or disappear, reduced to the essential, with photographic, cinematographic and digital realism, intended as a hypertrophic reflection of the world’s chaotic landscape. A conceptual and minimal painter of the Anthropocene and collapsology, his work essentially deals with ecological problems, while questioning the death of painting in the age of image proliferation. His shimmering, moiré paintings represent the disappearance of our civilisation, of the “old world”, and mark the transition between this “old world” and a more natural, magical “new world”.