j-c Pichaud

Jean-Marie deschamp
Des braises sous la neige.

Snowing on Chassagnes... the silent winter was invited abruptly; Livid, the sky envelops a nature silent, icy; behind the protective wall, beyond the steamy glass, two eyes watching, waiting: it is a voyeur, heart on fire, peering into space; This painter is a poet, a lone Scout, a calm soul...
More than forty years ago, Africa you had opened its immense spaces, the mirror of its waters... as Rimbaud, your soul artist, leaving the Northern mists, widened to this infinite palette...
And then this was the installation in Provence and doors of a domestic hell began, alas, to open... in the self-portraits of this time, the gaze is lost and seems scared of his own discoveries: the curve of the body, the silhouettes of women, solitary, intertwined, mothers, lovers, are there on the canvas, ready to battle... tortured, line seeks to achieve depth of; love and hatred are present... we need to go to the basics; in extreme poverty, human book battle; the color is dark; torn members seek after... a crucifixion overlooks battlefield... no place for outdoor décor softens the scene...
Searching in artificial stimulants of the means to enter the darkness of human beings, their mystery, the artist, in this endless spiral which is not to recall the world of Bacon will, little by little, lose his soul and body will soon succumb to these excesses...
If the art is sometimes therapy, he was here a drug which fails to be fatal... also came to the artist a very long time of abstinence, a cure of silence, an internal analysis...
Vital was this passage to be reborn... one might doubt the success of such an undertaking, but it was not counting on the will of the person concerned: the miracle took place, and another world appeared to the eyes of those who for many years followed the route of this being singular, solitary, sincere to the extreme...
As after a long nightmare, waking had the colors of dawn... evaporated bodies and their torment: under a delicate brush, a simple and quiet nature proposed a peace without clouds as once Daubigny in Barbizon landscapes... maybe, without knowing yet, artist aspired to recover memories of childhood in these loops of the Seine where he had grown up near Giverny?
In this rise of lost time, that freshness of the subject depicted Jean-Marie Deschamp a new force...
purified, the body and mind, laid on the canvas an impressionistic touch and on the edge of rivers, the poet walked to distant sources...
In his ascension to the purity, the artist then broke with the vision first of nature; He attached himself to the essential forms that he engaged the contemplation of the surrounding countryside; as if it was in the air, the geometry of the cultivated plots occupied all space; sometimes recondite fog free with cold dominant colors encircled a pattern which the hot hue caused a subtle contrast: this approach, at the limit of a geometric abstraction, brought to the visitor not a sense of anguish as in the imagination of De Chirico, but, on the contrary, a deep calming... departing from successive from the usual depths, the painter as plans often in Matisse, juxtaposed on the same plane his vision... all this voluntary simplification reminiscent, unconscious children in their first drawings colored... sometimes, the artist reveals, as lost on these structured spaces, silhouettes of figures, puppets to the absent gaze, images perhaps of the desire to detach human dating...
This aspiration to find a forgotten serenity brought Jean-Marie Deschamp to flee this lunchtime that had so inspired many of these predecessors famous or unknown; burned by too strong sunlight of human passions, suffocating in mediocrity ambient, fleeing the waves of the voyeurs of the summer, he resolved to bring into harmony its current life as an artist and his daily life: in this thirst for peace, silence, slowness in the work, depth, he fixed soon his gaze on this plateau of Haute-Loire: thus, the artist put his luggage : the hermit had finally found his refuge... like 'man' that works by Giacometti, Jean-Marie Deschamp found here in trails forgotten perfumes of the first years...
In his quest for the absolute, as Georges Rouault, he works at this time to the rhythm of the seasons.. .the snow falls on Chassagnes... he painted in the vast workshop; sometimes; the bow of Rostropovich in Bach's Suites, severely vibrates in the evening falls... it reads François Cheng...
"Often, but,
that mystery is close,
This donation to be still there
day after day, hear,
The cry, the singing, the flight,
continue trace
Mist, through
bright blood of sunset... »