From November 26, 2020
to December 23, 2020

From November 26 to December 23, 2020, Galerie Alexis Pentcheff and Galerie Maket are pleased to present a retrospective dedicated to the work of Jacques Martin-Ferrières. On this occasion, nearly one hundred and twenty paintings and sixty gouaches will be gathered between Avenue de Messine in Paris and Rue Paradis in Marseille.

These pictorial testimonies of small and great journeys liberate themselves from the physical constraints of their medium and create the illusion to reopen our borders for short imaginary peregrinations. From Collioure to Yugoslavia, through Marseille, Venice, Paris, and the United States, Jacques Martin-Ferrières revives our curiosity as visitors with his human crowds, appearing as nostalgic visions of universal folklore from which we are today temporarily deprived.

Son of the famous painter Henri Martin, Jacques tried to break away from this filiation throughout his career, although he admits his father’s considerable influence. Permanently seeking authenticity in his work, Martin-Ferrières is an artist immutably guided by a global vision of mankind and a subtle sensitivity to nature. He voluntarily distances himself from artistic fashions and revolutionary movements that he considers vulgar and ephemeral. Risking to appear conservative, his painting displays a real search for truth. 

An explorer of vibrant territories, Martin-Ferrières is eager for discoveries that he translates into universal visual expressions. The painter exults in the observation of new horizons and yet lingers over depicting the flavor of intimacy, the delicacy of a family scene, or still life. In all his subjects, the painter exercises his brushes to a contagious enthusiasm. On his canvases, filled with rigorously calibrated compositions, the colors live, inhabited by the evocation of tiny characters whose presence is emphasized by the dark circle, while the artist also produces with mastery a corpus of still lifes and depopulated landscapes imbued with a gentle nostalgia impatient with movement.