With Jean Jansem, everything begins — and ultimately returns — to drawing.
It is the matrix of his work, his primary language, the means through which he apprehends the world and restores its sensitive truth. A painter of the real, Jansem never ceased to place the human figure at the heart of his work, remaining faithful to a demanding vision of figurative painting, nourished by tradition yet firmly anchored in his own time.
Born in 1920 and trained in post-war Paris, Jansem belongs to a generation of artists who, rather than yielding to the dominant abstraction of the period, chose to pursue a profound exploration of humanity, its fragility and its dignity. An admirer of Rembrandt, Goya, Degas and Ensor, he aligns himself with a classical lineage that he never sought to imitate, but instead to extend through a deeply personal and immediately recognisable language.
His painting, often imbued with a subdued gravity, reveals silent figures, languid dancers, vulnerable nudes, carnival scenes and processions where sensuality, unease and melancholy coexist. Beneath the apparent mastery of the line lies a constant tension, a contained savagery in which flesh, colour and drawing engage in an uncompromising dialogue. Jansem does not paint subjects; he paints states of being, presences, fragments of humanity.
An attentive traveller, he drew inspiration from Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, in direct contact with the street, with weary bodies and ordinary gestures. He filled his sketchbooks with drawings taken from life, tirelessly observing the world around him. In the studio, these observations became compositions of great formal rigour, built upon a subtle balance between chromatic intensity, material density and the precision of drawing.
Over more than seventy years of work, Jansem developed an œuvre of remarkable coherence, marked by a profound moral and plastic exigency. A painter and draughtsman of rare mastery, he succeeded in evolving his palette and enriching his chromatic range without ever losing what lies at the very core of his art: the accuracy of the gaze and the primacy of the line.
Today represented in numerous public and private collections in France and abroad — notably in Japan, Russia and Armenia — Jean Jansem stands as one of the great figurative painters of the twentieth century. His work, of undiminished modernity, deserves to be rediscovered for what it truly is above all: a painting without compromise, deeply human, in which drawing and colour remain the sole vehicles capable of revealing truth.
