Jean Miotte — Almine Rech Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 18 → December 22, 2023

Jean Miotte is one of the prominent figures of lyrical abstraction within the New School of Paris. Since the very beginning, he favored gestures and action to transpose an emotion testifying of his complex relationship with sensitive reality, a philosophical and spiritual experience in service of the symbolism of the image. His discourse is borne out of a semantics where he regards the sign as the “I” who paints: “I am painting” he declares.

His approach tends to two extremes, on the one hand a writing at the height of thought and sensation, and jointly and exuberant spontaneity until the loss of oneself, in a Zen spirit. This vocation of the void was manifested especially from 1962 on, following regular stays in New York where he bonds with Rothko and Motherwell. Miotte gives praise to white that has become light, and which “radiates and erases limits”, he says. The fluid space is cut across by vigorous flat areas that extend into hemmed waves, torn to shreds in a spatial labyrinth whose complacent pitfalls it suppresses.

His painting shows a return to polychromy with a palette of pure tones, favoring the primaries whose sounds he exploits. The use of brushes, spatulas, knives, allows the effervescence of a cursive graphic design in colors with rich, vibrant, and sharp accents for a moving universe governed by contradictory and dual forces. A dissemination appeared in the seventies and eighties, for a new cycle centered on metamorphosis. Between violence and refinement, density and transparency, fervor and revolt, Jean Miotte’s painting achieves the quivering balance of life. The rhythmic arabesque of its forms is an echo of the dance that inspires it. The unity of his language is realized in this informal lyricism which reaches a pictorial plenitude by managing to give substance to his sensations of light, to make an indefinable sacred coincide in the energy of living.

Jean Miotte, who exhibited in Paris with Joan Mitchell, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Sam Francis, transcends a singular and immediately recognizable body of work.

Lydia Harambourg, Historian, Writer, Art Critic, Corresponding Member of the Institut de France, Académie des beaux-arts.