Jean-Luc Verna Vous n’êtes pas un peu beaucoup maquillé ? — Non — Air de Paris Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 10 → October 15, 2011

As the years pass Jean-Luc Verna’s worship of the iconic Siouxsie Sioux continues undiminished: she changed his life the moment when, as a teenager, he first saw on TV. Since then “La” Verna — after all, don’t we say “La” Callas? — has tirelessly modified, redrawn and embellished his tribute; yet while the tattoos accumulate, title used for his solo exhibitions remains immutable, “until after I’m dead”: haven’t overdone the makeup?" — "No".

La Verna keeps on serving up “the same old soup”: transfer drawings highlighted with makeup and big photographs combining art history and rock music references.
Because the oeuvre has always blended Klimt and Velázquez with Siouxsie and Nomi. The same old soup, Verna says; okay, but the plate it’s served in keeps changing. The drawings get new supports — wood panels — and new attributes: objects, pens, lanterns. And the body immortalised in the photographs openly the marks of time. Yet despite imminent debacle and disaster and an endlessly postponed announcement of ultimate apotheosis, Jean-Luc Verna accompanies unless it’s we, the transfixed viewers, who are accompanying him? — in preservation of the only thing capable of resisting the ineluctable: the pose.

Jean-Luc Verna recently showed at the Team Gallery in New York and with Brice Dellsperger at La Conservera (Salas Veronicas) in Murcia, Spain. He has just had a joint exhibition with Brice Dellsperger at Frac Alsace, in which he plays all the remakes of the Body Double series. In addition to contributing to many group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Villa Arson, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, MAC/VAL and elsewhere, he dances for choreographers Gisèle Vienne and Mickaël Phelippeau and sings with the group I Apologize.
His work has been acquired by MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, MacVal and numerous Regional Contemporary Art Collections (Fracs) in France.