The works of Jean-Paul Blais are low-relief sculpted woods. With intensity, passion, know-how, minuteness and a prodigious patience, the artist cuts and assembles, organises empty spaces, filling them up or not with thin lamellas and cuts, alternating the types of woods and the effects of various wooden fibres. After covering the surface with numerous layers of paint, intervenes the process of rubbing down, polishing, until the obtaining of vertiginously smooth surfaces, sliding, hit by the light, inviting to a tactile contact which raises nice and silky sensations. And, to add to the complexity of the works, the artist is executing them with a process of thickening the wood so as to obtain a convex surface, in order to better come to the encounter of the spectator’s eye and pick up the light.
The black works of Jean-Paul Blais recall, to a certain extend, the remark of Pierre Soulages, who stated, concerning a black painting : “Certain mornings, it is silver-grey. At other moments, picking up the reflections of the sea, it is blue. At other hours, it takes the shades of copper brown. In reality, it is always in agreement with the light received”.
The recent works of Jean-Paul Blais, of similar making and structure than the black and ivory works, are raw, without paint layers. The wood is nude. Artful labyrinths in which we are tempted to follow an imaginary Ariadne’s clew, the fields are geometric, full of hollows, of low-reliefs, of signs or, on the contrary, assert a plane surface.
In a masterly way, sometimes strongly structured, sometimes showing a silent sobriety, the artist works in the quietude of his atelier, in search of the immanence, the essential, a transcendental relinquishment. Through original steps, he is in quest of provoking astonishment, surprise, questioning, inciting to a silent bewilderment.
André Malraux in Les Voix du Silence, affirmed : “As love, art is not pleasure but passion”. It is indeed a work animated by passion that Jean-Paul Blais is creating, in which time seems to be suspended.
Jean-Paul Blais lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland
He mainly exhibited in French Switzerland. In July his works will be presented in San Francisco and Hawaii.
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